


Intermission: Marked

by Sunderlorn



Series: Simra Hishkari: Dunmer of Skyrim [3]
Category: Elder Scrolls, Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim
Genre: Chats with ghosts are never chill, Creatively Designed Zombies, Debate upon the morals of varying forms of necromantic practice, Dirty jokes that no-one quite gets or commits to telling, Dunmer - Freeform, Gen, God damn Dunmer Hillfolk, God damn Vereansu, House Sadras, How weird has the dog become? So weird. So weird you don't even know, Kings wot live in huts, Morrowind, Necromantic Counter-Measures for Necromantic Nastiness, Nix-Hound herding and husbandry, Non-binary protagonist, Oh dear god that awful boy is back again what's he doing here and who invited him?, Post Red Year, Rivers aflow with glass; land made rich with blood; ground sown heavy with bones, Simra Hishkari Blanket Burrito, Sugar is sin, TFW you forget to eat or sleep or wash for days because you're busy doing the bidding of ghosts, The Things People Will Do For Free Real Estate, The self-indulgent over-description of landscapes, Wild passionate headcanoneering with no basis in canonicity, You got a long-lost sister and YOU get a long-lost sister and YOU get a long-lost sister!, bad things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-27
Updated: 2017-02-06
Packaged: 2018-08-27 08:11:00
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 7
Words: 37,013
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8393881
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sunderlorn/pseuds/Sunderlorn
Summary: An intermission between parts two and three of Simra's story. An ashlander wisewoman, Tammunei Ereshkigal wanders mainland Morrowind after the Red Year, reflecting on the land's recovery, while following the trail of a renegade necromancer. When a figure from Tammunei's past appears, they offer their help -- Tammu never asked, but they won't take no for an answer.





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Non-italicised parts are chronological. The only consistency in the italicised sections is that they occur somewhere in the past. They are not always in strict order. They are memories, and not always memories belonging strictly to the protagonist themself.

Growing, not grown, for it’s ongoing. All things are ongoing until they stop. Growing, I think: I am always growing, and part of this is growing old. And part of this is growing older, older til age catches up. Strange as ageing may be in mer, there’s always a time when youth’s all used and what comes after sets in.

So, I think: I am growing older. Every year I think it. Each Summer makes it more true. One Sun’s Height day I’ll think it again and find it’s come full-true. There’s a supple waiting in that – an eager awaitment flecked with fear that wanes and wanes – and I suppose it’s something meant to be. A thing that’ll make me more myself, or who I’ll one day be.

When I’m a crone, and keep wisdom in every crease of me, like the good kind of old clothes show strength in every darning stitch and every crease… When that time comes, and I look the part to anyone with eyes to see, I wonder: will all this at last feel right? For now, for so much of the time, it feels stolen. Or like a thing that stole me from myself. Duty and purpose; the role that marks me for the good of my clan. But sometimes a question comes bitter to me: what clan?

Those are larger tasks and longer thoughts. Brewed and turning beneath my scalp they turn my mind from smaller things. The smaller task I’ve set myself. I fumble and fumble til finished.

With a needle of bone I fish with thread, through layers of leather, soft-smooth with use. Leather that’s soft and foreign and strange here; half as old as I am; skinned from the flanks of a springtime buck. Here there are no deer to skin, nor any deer to eat, but their meat I can do well enough without. Memory makes the taste a dark one. At least there’s sinew still – or braids of kresh-fibre, if my fingers weren’t so clumsy with plaiting things – and that’s enough for thread. With a needle of bone and stitches of sinew, I fix a seam in my buckskin leggings.

A noonday Autumn sun stretches over my outstretched legs and stills the winds into basking. Warm for the season, and under it, I bask too. My legs are bare and smooth and drenched in prickling light — a feeling like bearing being looked at when you want to be seen; wearing the gaze of someone whose gaze itself is a goodness.

I lose track in tides of thought. I lose thought in swells of feeling. Forgetting the work of my hands, I fumble, and prick my palm. I leave the needle half stuck through the hide. My hand flits up slapping-quick to my mouth where I nurse it til the pain stops. A beady welling of blood; a copper taste on my tongue. Old strong clothes show their age in every sign of mending.

 

 

_Like listening to what fills my hands. Their shape and smooth rattle, dicing together. I listen them out: the sounds they make when moving, and the silence of their stillness. Nanrahamma says the latter’s more important._

_“Listen for the song they sing when they’re making no sound at all. That’s how you’ll learn to sing it back.”_

_Three days. Tears from me then tears from her._

_She pulls my hair. Tells me I should be better than this, and why am I not, why can I not. And I say how sorry I am for all the things I’m not and can’t. And then we try again._

_Three days. My cheeks and arms are pinch-marked, painful._

_Tanet reminds her I’m a child, scolding her. And I say yes, smiling through tears and the sting of my scalp, glad of a blameless reason to fail into._

_Nanrahamma sets her mouth. There is hope behind her lips and sorrow between her teeth. In the way she looks at me there’s a pride that wants so much to be proud._

_“Again,” she says._

_Three days. On the third I sing back the sound of the bones in their silence. They listen. I hear them listening. And in my hands, like the brittle-bone stirrings of a newborn bird, I feel the dead bone shift. A waking memory. It remembers what it is to live and grow. Two fistfuls of knucklebones, taken from sheep — with womb-like speed and womb-deep quiet they knit, and knot. Twining, their change is warm on my skin as heat escapes the spell._

_I look down. Hands open, the success of my spell is ugly. A lump of misfit bone now, yellow-grey, unknown and unwanted in any natural body. Like the reset run of once-melted wax they’re clustered and woven over each other._

_“An ugly thing,” Nanrahamma nods, letting go the pride she held back. “But a thing you’ve broken the use out of in the name of something more useful by far. The better to learn how magic can mend.”_

_I’m washed in her pride. Clean and kind, glow and glowing, I forget and forgive how she hurt me._

 

 

Some things I am quick with. Like a fish learning to swim, some things feel like an inborn thing that just wants wakening. But with others the lessons won’t stay inside me. Needlework, numbers, reading faces, tones of voice. I learn and yet learn nothing. I change and stay the same.

But my stockings at least are mended. The work is clumsy: a criss-cross of ugly stitches made from thread too thick for this purpose, all along the worn-through side of one leg. Ugly, yes, but still the tear is closed.

I think: I would have done better with wounds and blood and living flesh.

I think: there’s little can better or worsen the look of me.

It hardly matters. My hair is a birdsnest. Half my eyes are halfway blind. The short curtain of coral and shell beads that cape round my shoulders whispers ‘Ahemmusa’. And I think on my harrow-marked face, and the red of my hair, and my ageless sexless strangeness. Every town or outpost or farmstead I find and enter, only the children see past that seeming. To all the rest it makes me opaque and I wear it like armour that wards against eyes.

I stand, teeter on one leg and then on the other, and I slide back into my stockings again. With that my reason to stop and sit is gone. There’s still too much light left in the day to conscience a stop for the night. Journey on then, I journey on.

The mountain I sat and turned my back on, I turn to face again. A long tough-scathing climb, with short stretches of hiking that comparison makes out like mercies.

In the keening wind on the rocks that surround me, I think I hear them as I go. They beg me to linger and listen; they urge me upward and on.

I think: I’ve heard you call and I’m coming; only give me time; I’m coming. I’ll hear you clearer then. In wanting me, be patient.

There are few things make the dead impatient and fewer that turn them desperate. Taken together, they mean serious trouble. I climb the peak in this broken grey land to hear from them what, in my fear-tied belly, I already know. By rumour and gut-deep dread, I know.

 

 

_Cranyons and shatters, this tattered swathe of highland. Gulleys and valleys and open cleaves of water — in these hills they split from their sources, and cut towards the sea. Blades of rock crag into the sky. Swathes of earth, weed-grown or bare._

_All of it’s hued like the worst kinds of weather – storm-grey, rain-grey, mist-grey, ashen – and the people are much the same. Most have always been here, since long before longest memory, they say. In the lowlands, so many were driven away when the ground shook and opened up and the winds blew ash from the East. But here the mountains shielded their children. They did not run. Others joined them in recent years, and even in so short a time the hills made hillfolk and highlanders of them, as hills and harsh high places do. As these mountains did once so long ago, long before longest memory._

_For all I’ve trudged alone through them, they’ve yet to harsh my softness. On a day all breeze and moaning stone, I say silent sorries to my aching feet. On a stony half-flat hillside, I hear my way towards life._

_A nix-boy sits a spur of rock and watches over his pack. Rattling and talking each to one another in the high teapot hisses and flutelike keenings, the nix-pack graze sparse on spindlegrass and root for grubs and burrow-bug nests._

_They shie from my coming as I pick across the hillside. They part and round to flank me. In the hackled-up rise and show of their shell-plates, and the threat-or-threatened searching of their long tonguetennae through the air, they remind me they are not herd-beasts._

_I sing soft to them, telling them I know, I know. My voice is a cooing telling hum. Their territory is theirs still, for all my feet might cross it, I say. But I cannot sing a spell over the boy in the same way._

_“Hoy, stranger!” He stands on his spur, underfed-small and with a sling-staff raised clear in one hand. In the other he holds a shard of flint. “No closer now. My nix’re hungry. One word from me…”_

_He lets the threat hang uncertain. I stop in my tracks all the same._

_“Your nix like me,” I say. By now they’ve gone back to their grazing and grubbing. “You’re the only one who’d hurt me here. Why?”_

_“You’re a stranger on my uncle’s claim is why. And you talk like an outlander!” He loads the flint into the cradle of his sling. “Warn you stranger…step any closer, stay any longer, you’ll bring down the guard-curse and won’t no soul be to blame but yours.”_

_“What curse?” I ask more curious than afraid. I felt no curse on my coming here._

_“My mama’s death-curse is what.”_

_“I’ll be certain to tell your mother the same thing I tell you. I’ll be off your claim and gone as soon as you tell me the way to go. What village are you and your uncle from?”_

_He scowls like I’ve put a riddle to him and not a simple question. “No village. Just us.”_

_“All the better then. I won’t bother you any more once I get to the nearest one.”_

_His scowl tightens. His arms fall. “Stregaris,” he says, and points. “That way til past noon. Down til you find the brook, then follow the flow. First high-nosed king-cowerer you see, that’s how you’ll know you’re in Stregaris.”_

_“Blessings on you.” I nod my thanks and go down the hill. “And on your mother’s ghost, and whatever ghosts she joined.”_

_“Don’t think I’m not still watching!” he calls at my back. “Don’t think she’s not neither!”_

_He lies without knowing it. Half his threats are more empty than they ought to be. His mother is not watching as she should be._

_Before noon I find a mommet, strung up like a scarecrow on the hillside: arms out, with once-fine hillfolk clothes hanging from the corpse-bundle of bones inside. Now the whole idol is bird-troubled, its earth-red shortrobe pecked and moth-bitten full of holes. A Dunmer skull grins sad from inside a peaked headdress. The beads stitched into its attire rattle empty in the wind. I wonder: was this the nix-boy’s mother, or another hilltribe ancestor gone from the land they charged their ghosts to guard?_

_Past noon I find Stregaris, and in Stregaris I find answers._

 

 

I am high enough now that the hillfolk reckon anyone who has clambered this far has earnt their assistance. Scarves and scraps of cloth show the spiral path up the mountain. Yellow dye from nix-bile; red-brown from birch soot; a shy blue, crushed from wildflowers in spring maybe. They greet me celebrant, and tell me the way now is mostly a matter of feet, not grazed knees and groping hands.

To my back the day is striped with fog, heavy and low in the valleys. A swarm of shapes pick across a headland. The sky above is cold blue-white. Below is grey, dark-green, with flushes of red and gold; the tight-knit huddles of high gnarled woodland have begun to change their leaves.

All this is Stregaris. A kingdom to those who live under its king, and to the other hilltribe kings who look envious over its borders. To any outsider, it’s only a hacking of sparse harsh land between two mountains, and its king is barely a chieftain. But high places and craggy surrounds will make a world seem small. And the hillfolk reckon any mer who bows to no-one else is a king, no matter how petty, and the lands they can protect, and the lands of those who’ll bow to their rule, are theirs. Kings and kingdoms by the scores, hidden by hill and mountain and highland valley.

That thought pleases me. My ancestors were khans and khan-makers, brides to khans and mothers to khans. And as for me, only yesterday I ate with a king. My mother will be pleased, to see our line’s not fallen so far as she thought.

 

 

_I do not know the rites for meeting them. I am a guest, so bring gifts, but beyond that I’m foreign as the gaze of every Stregaran tells me that I am. What business, they say, do I have with their king? What right do I have to the honour that, yearly, they fight and toil for?_

_My heart is a cornered rat, a caged bird. My heart is holding its breath. I have grown worse at this. In all this smoke and all this shade, my eyes struggle to stay dry._

_The king’s lodge sits round and dome-roofed. Cliff, mountain, the king’s lodge — these are the only stone-built things for leagues around, and the lodge wears its pride in painted designs, red and beige and black on its walls. Off the central hall, tunnels tail off under the mountainside. They lead away into privacy for the king and their family, but here in the hall we are public._

_A mat is lain in the room’s bright middle under a branching brass lamp-tree. And the mat is a diamond or a square, stitched with rocky geometries, cliff-borders, billows of wind._

_I sit at one corner. A lading sits between us, filling the mat in a pattern of its own. Steamed millet-flour buns; longbeans fried oily with wild garlic; a shell-stock soup; chunks of wild kagouti, stewed in oil and salt-strong fermented sauce that smells of gall. Bowls of redware and stoneware pots; a pot of copper and a tarnished trencher of hammered silver._

_“…A four-horned kagouti, and with a face more scars than flesh! And yet they stood, feet rooted – our king – and levelled their spear in hand! … Through its mouth and half the spear-shaft deep, I tell you! A ruin of a good kagouti-spear, but the makings of a feast..!”_

_“And an omen too. A fine omen. Four horns, it had. The very image of your first, my king!”_

_“It bodes great things.”_

_“Good things.”_

_“To good things, I tell you, I’ll drink to good things in days to come!”_

_The king’s attendants boast of their ruler and their deeds while the king sits in silence. They raise cups of millet mazte and crow so their king can keep humble. It has the air of ritual; all the tone and polish of custom. It hides their worry poorly._

_The king waves their hand and the attendants fall to quiet._

_“Be welcome,” says the king, “in this lodge and land which are mine.”_

_“My gratitude.” I force out words and regret the disorder of every one. “I have a gift. I’m of the Ahemmusa – the coast and isles Ahemmusa – and though I’ve travelled Morrowind these last few years I—…I never learnt the ways of you and your people. But I hope you won’t take offence if… That is, it’s our way with guests and hosts to—…” Do it. Your words are worthless. Let the glass speak for you. “I hope you won’t be offended. Here. In thanks.”_

_I take a leather pouch from inside my smock and make to pass it across the feast mat._

_One of the attendants, thatch-bearded and with a scar half caving in one brow, clucks his tongue. “It’s our way,” he says, “that gifts are given around and from hand to hand. Never over. The king should have it from the hands of one he trusts…”_

_“Let the stranger be, Hunzil. They misstep out of ignorance, not ill intent.” The king says it with a growl and reaches out a calloused and tattooed hand, direct towards me. I give them the pouch and they tease open the drawstring. “Glass! That’s good green glass, friend. See, Hunzil? Sometimes a slip in tradition is worth the returns.”_

_I let myself look up. A mane of coily hair flows loose over the king’s broad shoulders. Soot-dark patterns are pricked out on their neck, just as on their hands before. They’re grown old, lined and crag-faced yet still hairless-smooth. A younger mer’s vivid eyes strike ruby-red and small from under their heavy brow._

_“Then you’re pleased?” I manage. My eyes drop, relieved. The mer who calls themself king is swathed in a lush brown shortrobe. Chips of dark nix-shell nacre and gleam there, stitched onto the fabric — armour or ornament, I wonder? It’s easier to look at their clothes than the life and intensity in their face…_

_“I am. With your glass, yes, but more pleased you’ve come.”_

_“Then you know why? And what I am?”_

_“I know you’ve come about our dead, friend, and that makes you prayer-sent, whatever my companions might say. Welcome..?” Their voice lapses off into a question. I take up in answer:_

_“Tammunei Ereshkigal, child of Jemikh, One Who Speaks and One Who Listens, born of the Ahemmusa.”_

_These words at least are easier. I am myself no longer. Only what I am marked for, and that speaks for me._

_We eat. Of the food I like only the bread and broth but try to force down a little of everything. The kagouti they praised so high was worst of all. I endure their strangling looks, and the king’s stifling respect, and the jealousy it brews in every other mer among their attendants._

_After the feast, my yurt is a grave-quiet bliss. And I am myself again. And I am tired._

 

 

It nestles tight against the mountaintop, here where its clamber summits. A narrow plateau, rough and bare; the black-stone baked-earth leftovers of pyres gone by; and all round, sky and mist and a world-edge I dare not look over.

The shrine is a squat shape, large and timeless-solid in the flattest part of this planeless place. Paint daubs its bricks in bright sight-scouring white and blazing sky blue, but under the colour it’s built like a kiln: a great low dome, sides gentle enough to climb. And in the center of its roof is a mouth, a hole, a chimney, gaping into darkness.

I walk closer and already I can hear them. Like all the noise of a wilderness night, whispering and crying from out of the shrine. No need to listen — up here they’re in the wind, with voices like smoke and grinding stone. Inside they speak through darkness.

my name what was my name what was i called yours i know it is one i have heard spoken hope and horror you see us you see us we know you see

The king told me where I must go. My path wends up the shrine’s painted flanks. Like scaling the side of a sleeping beast, I crawl on skinned hands and knees and scrambling feet, afraid to wake it, afraid…

my baby wrapped in my child my baby wrapped you’ve seen her have you seen how i must go let me go let me go i must see her open sky open sky sky opens swallows me

And now I’m by the hole. The mouth-chimney. From here I see its edges, black with greasy smoke gone by. The smell of bitter incense lingers round its lipless lips.

you’ve come glad you’ve come come to us swim the river’s cool the river’s cool the shade cold down to us with warm it’s cold you see you see us we know you see

A ladder of rope is bundled up on the rim. I tip it over into the smoke-scented black. I watch it spool down. Did it always have to be me, I wonder? I wish now it could be anyone else. The dead hold no fear for me; the dead hold no fear… I take myself by surprise. Clumsy I heave myself onto the ladder. And the fibres creak. And I follow where it fell.

I call no magelight. Already I’m disturbing the dead with life – waking the sleepers – and that’s bad enough. I tell myself: it’s better this way, not to worry the dark with light. It’s the way of this place and I respect it as best I can. Here, I am a guest.

I swing helpless on the ladder. Inside a vague grey shaft of mountain daylight, the woven rope creaks. Under my grudge-tight hands its threads are greasy black, chalky white, mongrelled with strains of brown, red, dun. I think: they have braided it from hair. This ladder alone contains generations.

My weight makes it swing. The last rung comes, and leaves my scrabbling feet still too high to feel the floor. I stop and pant a moment in fear, churning the air with my shoe. A whimper turns tight my throat. In a clench of teeth I cage it. Is this part of the rite? Have faith. I let myself fall.

welcome you are welcome by your marks we know you welcome

Clouds of skin-tickling dust rise from where I land, heaped and bruised. In the shrine’s deep-dug black, every smell is ash and incense, and the dry chaste scent of bone. Like a vaulted cave can echo, the borders of this blackness murmur and repeat. Voices upon voices, they welcome me, ward against me, guest and unguest me.

welcome speaker listen well

There is a touch. Not against my skin, but touching my clothes; touching my clothes so they touch my skin, so they touch me. Another test. Another step on the path. I will not flinch, though I long to flinch, though my teeth and heart sing out to flinch, call Josket, find and return to the light… Hedged in fear and closed from my self, I feel two terrors vie over me. I am a bone between them — a scrap of maw-torn meat. One is panic, the other a numb acceptance. I sink into the latter and let its cold calm me.

I am now what I’m marked for. I make myself feel the what that I am, foremost and over the who. The voices of the dead teem round me. I try to stay still and silent, soft in the midst of their storming. I am a vessel for them, and a mouth that will speak their words.

It’s always this way, before my duty draws me in. There is a part of me that wants no part of it. It’s always this way. Like every time a bird takes flight it must seem for a second like falling.

I open myself. The ghosts rush in.

 

 

_She comes. Knows the way to call. Has made the journey. By sweat has earnt our ear. And when she calls she cuts our sky-deep slumber. Urges us out from inside the mountain, where bones and ashes keep and house us._

_The us I’m aspect of. The we that I am and have been since when, since when… So hard to say when my memories are ours, and our are mine, and all combined, encombed. A thing that sits inside us all, cell by cell and voice by voice, like honey sits hived, and when it flows, it flows sweet through us all. The sweet gold taste of mountain honey; the salt steel taste of new let blood._

_Through us, all and every one. So easy to fall in the flow and be lost. Yet I have kept a sense of me, for now, how long, for now..._

_She calls the call that means she has another. A burial, new to the fold. We ready our embrace._

_Incense and prayersmoke makes us open. She is not of our blood, some among us see. Then why does she know our rites? some among us ask. We are what we are and cannot do elsewise. She knows the rites. What we are opens to receive another._

_We are fed. One more voice it seems at first. Then the sickness. We feel it, then feel nothing. A part is taken. Excised. Some of what spoke is silent. We who are mourned, at first we mourn. Then in a confusion of questions, we come to a single-voiced anger._

 

 

“…done to us what has been done to us what did she do give it back the bite she took and still the gape still weeps there is a there is a rent like a wound we who forgot how flesh can hurt give it back!”

The words pour out and stop. Or their sound stops, but still they fill me. The scorch of my taken tongue still lingers though the burn of the words they put in me is all but over now. Like an arrowhead loosed from the wound it made, the invasion is over but the hurt remains.

I am stumbling across the hillside. I am halfway down the mountain before my eyes are my own and my legs will obey. First I ask them: stop. They melt from under me. I come to a bruise-kneed kneel, then curl them in and sideward. I stop and rest and hear my breath. It sobs, and sobs.

It’s a different thing to hear the dead than to let them in. It’s a different thing to fill myself with the ghosts that make up my line. They have cause to love me, guard me, and want so little back. They know when to speak and when to fall silent. Not like this. Ghosts with no bond to me, not by blood nor bone. Strangers in my home; strangers under my skin; and their tongues talk dry in my mouth; and their hands are cold as they grasp and want and want. But they do not want or need me safe. They need me only as ears and eyes and hands: a tool in a world they cannot touch.

It was easier in Skyrim. At least I think it was easier in Skyrim. Or is that another memory I cannot trust as mine? I think the dead were not so loud, but in Morrowind I cannot listen for any living thing without hearing them, dead within it. Every piece of magic I work, I see and hear them wanting to be seen and heard and obeyed…but most of all just recognised. Do not forget us; please do not forget. The unrited dead of buried towns. The restless dead of shattered tombs. The longing dead of all this ruin-haunted doom-haunted hope-haunted land…

And though I have my tongue and feet and hands, and am drenched in daylight again, I don’t trust them to be gone. Not while they have need of me.


	2. Chapter 2

_I thought it would be beautiful. Like music too complex to be heard as anything but noise. So many voices, and a chorus of them all. A unison of colours, touches, beckoning and welcome. But not if I had a thousand years and a hundred ears to hear with, listening into every voice, every stream of sound… Not if I had a hundred ways to hear and a thousand years to hear in could I have made anything of it but chaos._

_Wind gusts saltspray up from the inner sea. It stings us. Our feet are soaked, plash plash plash, through the shallows where the tide makes breaks in the landbridge. Sandbars, spits of silt; the shattered-skull cave-in of a tumbledown dome. Spires crop up from the sea and the sucking mud. And they look like claws, and they look like clawing; like someone half lost in quicksand, fingers still searching for a hand to help them._

_Unbury me, it says. Unbury me. I drowned in the wet dirt, the liquid silken silt so long ago. Even the corpses of these two cities have a voice._

_Was this the way my mother came when she led her khan-husband across the water? No. They hitched together their boats; she and all her people. Nanrahamma saw it coming. She warned and they went before all this could take hold. But it must have been here, when here was different… She lost kin in the crossing. For all the noise in my skull I have no chance to hear them. It’s bad, I’m bad, too weak for my duty…_

_We try to cross, only six of us now, we who were so many before. Carts and litters and packguars, and pilgrims going on foot, and now there are so few. Plash plash through the shallow salt water on foot. Kresh kresh cross the landbridge’s shatter-sunk stone. They look to me and I cannot see them back._

_The sound and the feel of their presence are like cataracts. I’m veiled in it, wrapped and wrapped — the curtain turns tighter each step that I take._

_It’s not the storm that turns us fleeing. We fail and fall back, back to the mainland. And for a time after that I’m broken._

 

 

I wonder if this is why I keep to the hills and high places. The parts of the world walled off from the rest, where sky and stone rise up like the skin of a tent and close you in. Places where the distance is there, but small and strange, not seeming real.

It helps me to think of one thing at a time. Do one thing at a time. Small victories, instead of seeing all the things I leave undone as defeat, shame, failure. Looked at wrong they heap and heap til their swell is choking and thick as oil. Like getting caught up in the wide strong trawl of a wave. Drowning.

Do I restrict myself? Yes, I restrict myself, now more than usual.

The hide walls of my yurt are tight around me and even the wind outside is a whisper. Here is a world all mine. Safe and close, closed off in calm. Here is a thing I earnt at least: a home of my own, to carry with me, always with me. And I make myself think the thing of which it’s meant to remind me:

Home is not over the Inner Sea. Home is not across the landbridge you failed to cross, or guide them across. Home is where you are.

And where I am is wreathed and warm in fragrant smoke and tea-steam. In the scent of stoneflowers and the staggertogether of smells so much my own I’ve ceased to smell them. Home is where I am. Here – safe despite my shaking hands – I almost believe it. Alone, I am alone. And my skin is my own. And all I contain is myself and mine, no voice here uninvited.

“Warded. Guarded. Sacred. Safe.” I say this to myself. It’s a calming lie. Like lullabies, or the soft words you speak to a guar when your knife is at its neck… “Warded. Guarded. Sacred? Safe?”

I finish my tea. I let the steam from my cup warm my face, and the cup itself heat my palms. And like hide turns into leather by a long slow cure – no change at first or as you watch, but one day done and finished – my thoughts turn over and over what the ancestors of Stregaris have told me.

Memories of places I’ve never seen. Impressions and images, stamped raw onto the back walls of my brain. Cairn-topped hills and dark cracks opening into hillsides. A sense of being shackled, limp, unable to stop what someone has started to do to you—…

And that almost pulls me back into myself. And that almost starts me shaking again, feeling keen and ragged the scars that still ridge my palms.

…—But I carry on as I ought to. Sifting and sifting, like some hopeless hopeful panning for glass in the low riverlands to the north and south. And there in amongst it all are things she left as she groped heavyhanded to take from them. Glimpses of herself, like scraps of cloth and bloodstains, left on the thorns of a hedge you fought through. This is what I hoped to find, and this is what I needed.

Time passes. I emerge into the mountain air. Racers shriek and gibber unseen in the heights. Somewhere, the sloping sound of tumbling scree.

Behind me, my yurt collapses itself. The struts of sung bone bend flat and break down. The hides smooth and wrap themselves tight around. The braided moor-ropes draw themselves in and snake themselves round and round the lot, bundling it. Watching it go up is a little like watching a flower bloom. Collapsing it though has something of wilting in it.

I think on this defiler of the dead. On what she is and wants, and what she’s searching for. Not bodies and bones; nothing so physical. Only more. That’s the only answer that comes for now. She wants more of what she’s taken already: noise and voice and memory.

Stregaris, she’s already plundered and picked dry. She’ll have to look further, travel on.

So I travel on.

 

 

_East of Morrowind’s westmost horn, the land broke once and still is broken. Sea intrudes beyond its shore. Land reaches roots out into the sea. Like fingers twine and intertwine, they twist and pull and wrench for the upper hand but only intermingle. Gorges opened when the ground shook and split and now they flow with streams. Earth and water; earth and water._

_I hear in dreams some dead voice say: There first came rains, then driving winds, pushed over us by the following charge of dust. On the breeze and in its midst, the wind was fanged with glass. Hot, it was hot, leagues and leagues it travelled from the mountain’s mouth, but still the dust was searing. Motes and shards and specks of dark and oily green. Some it flayed as they tried to run. Others it buried. Some homes and tombs and towns, the ground swallowed when it cracked into gapes and pits. The world rearranging itself in convulsions, like birth or a public hanging._

_A hundred years ago, and going on another hundred more, and still the riverbeds flow with glass._

_People fought in the days that followed the quakes and dust, I am told. They fought for the glass that had skinned their friends and fell hot from the sky. Mer killed mer to fill sacks and baskets._

_A hundred years ago, and going on another hundred more, and now they fight for portions of river, stream, standing pond, to sieve for glass in the silt. New rivers, new streams, some of them, but the glass and the blood and the greed are the same. It is the hope they returned for and the hunger that drove them glass-mad._

_A land already unquiet with death that even the ghost-deaf can hear, and they add to it daily. I wade in the water. In the silence of the moons, I sing the glass into my waiting palms, like catching fish with spells and song. And I rush back to where my yurt has pitched itself, fearing for myself, afeared…_

_A ways downriver, I feel a life go out. Another dead for the greed I glimpsed, and held dark-green in my hands, and thought: what is its worth to me?; its use?; a gift, perhaps; a guest-gift…_

 

 

Part of me thinks it’s good to hear the sea again. Whatever else its waves might say, the Inner Sea is an old friend. White foam on near-black waters, glossy-dark as ground-oil, it spreads like a sash, wide from horizon to horizon. Still, on clear days it shows me sights of Vvardenfell. A far shore, smooth and vague with distance: the shallow band of the Bitter Coast. And those are bitter days.

Under my feet the ground is soft and giving, soft and grey. Ages of dust and cinder-choked winds settled and turned to soil. Between cuts of stream, broad swathes of river, the ground is fertile, plough-willing, like the long years it lay fallow had left it lonely, longing for the prying hands and delving tools of settled-folk, and the pride they take in seeding land, owning land, claiming, covering, coveting land. So I imagine, from the steads and hamlets I see as I go.

A flat terrace of field, sides shored up with wickerworks of trama-wood. The crops in it are motley: attempts at coarse barley and stray shares of wild millet blown down from the hillfolk’s half-tame gardens, up in the mountains and days away. Or else a sodden patch of land in the fork of a river where some settler has stilted a hovel and tried to paddy off land for saltrice.

I pass on. Unwashed, I think; unkempt, I think. Nestlike hair and haggard skin and pit-dark eyes from travelling night and day, and night again, and day. They’d think me some mad thing come down from the hills – a mabrigash or worse – and I don’t want to see through their eyes how right they are.

I hide from myself as much as from people. But in moments of clarity, I see strange and stark. How I’m hounded, hunted, whipped and spurred into doing as I do, and am doing, and am doing. Or am trying to do. How duty rides me ragged.

I do not remember when I last stopped to eat. I take most of my sleep when I stumble, fall, and close my eyes, and even then something in me tells me: weak, this is weakness.

Since the mountaintop shrine, I spoke with more ghosts. Feeble with theft and fragile with rage, they crowded me, each time, each time. Hungry and half-mad as they were, I had to share myself to make sense of them. I cannot contain them all. I fail, I am failing, will fail. But to not so much as try..?

 

 

_One. A cleft in a river-carved crack through the land. Barefoot and with shoes tucked into my sash, I walk through trickles of water, and over smooth-worn stones. The whole dark is rife with whispers. The sounds of the stream. The curious touches of the dead, picking at me. Stroking hands on the struggle of my senses. A stoop-ceilinged cavern, walled and floored with bones._

_Two. My hands are black and my nails are broken. There was no other way to dig. I delve and claw at the dirt. Scraping sudden, I feel fired clay bricks beneath my fingertips. I feel and search til I find the edge of an opening. Like a wellmouth, but fixed with a door. Flaking paint and iron studs in shapes that tell me the name of the family whose tomb this was._

_Three. No tomb at all. No shrine. Only a patch of ground where they find me. They are raw and ravenous. Raving, riteless. Dozens of them buried here, no ceremony, before their time, and I can’t unhear the cries they speak in. On my knees, my grazed bruised knees, my brow to the ground and back bent double. On my knees I let them in._

 

 

My thoughts are marshlights, dim and strange. Dim and distant, my body’s needs are sunken. They surface in panic, surprising me, and then they sink again.

I feel the song on my lips, resonant in my head-voice, before I know its purpose. Its music calls and calms. I learnt it listening to birds, racers, anything I’ve yet seen on the wing. I learnt it rather than learn to hunt. A wise-woman’s clan should provide for her, Nanrahamma said, but she must always be ready to provide for herself…

A racer pulls off from the flock, stoops down through the sky towards me. It lands. Bony hook of beak and beating scant-plumed wings; body stubbled with coarse down, like feathers that never quite were. All this I feel beneath my hands, quills pricking my palms. A moment’s struggle and its neck breaks.

My stomach remembers itself. Wakes as my teeth tear and my throat swallows. Raw meat. My belly cries out. Is it hunger or disgust? One, I sate. The other remains, surfaced, then sinks again.

 

 

_“It’s not only knowing the how of it. Yes, you’ve got to know how to call them. Yes, you’ve got to know who it is you’re letting in, ancestors know you must. Dangerous if you don’t, Nan. Like walking the knifepools at night and shoeless — stupid, stupid, a danger you deserve if you do, d’you understand?”_

_I nod. I understand. No right yet to ask onward. Next to Uramarat the whole world seems young. Her smooth eggshell scalp, like something river-worn, ancient as water. Her deep crabbed eyes, so old they see more of death now than they do of anything this side of the Waiting Door — so old she needs me to eye for her. But next to her I am younger even than most. ‘Why’ isn’t yet a word I can let her know I know._

_“But there’s more. Girl? D’you hear me? No dreams now! Not while there’s daylight yet to burn.”_

_She scolds me. Leaves me hurting. Another starburst of pinch-bruised skin on the pinch-bruised skin of my arm. That, for my lapse in learning._

_Still I’m bitter. She says we must all of us use daylight as best we can and that if we want time for ourselves and not for our work then we can cut it wholecloth from sleeptime. But I see no daylight – or nearly no daylight – in the hours of it I spend with Uramarat. Only yurtbound darkness, smoke and gloom._

_“Now you listen to me, Nanra, and listen well. Dangerous if you don’t, d’you hear?”_

_But my eyes have started to well. Urama clucks in her throat, shaming more than salving my hurt._

_“That? Girl, never you mind that. It stings and so does learning, but that’s the way of the whole wide world. You learn not to sit too close to the fire by finding out it hurts. Pain warns and pain teaches. Scars are how the body remembers and pain’s how the mind does the same. Think any youngster would heed their harrow-marks if we numbed their faces first? Tstch!”_

_I nod that I know, but wish I didn’t have to._

_“Now listen. What I say now may one day save you. Before you go wading in the Ghostline, know the how of the calling, the who of what they are. But more than that, know yourself. That’s what’ll keep you afloat. If you don’t? Well…”_

 

 

The hollow I am is swarmed with voices and visions, knowings and questions. No, not a swarm but a sea. I lose sight of my self but my Ghostline remains. Like stars overhead to chart myself by, while I’m swept along below.

Tonight I dream through my own Ghostline. A new voice in its chorus. New light, new sights, and I wake from them sobbing.

My skin is damp. I was not in my flesh for a time. I saw through her eyes and wore what was her skin, before age came and tanned it into the face and flesh I knew. But now I feel my own cold sweat and the nothing that rages round me.

The night is silent. Curled in the dirt on my side I lie, smock stiff with days and days of dirt. Beads rattling like a chatter of teeth, I sit up til my aching legs are tangled beneath me. My face is hot with crying. I hunch down.

Alone, I am alone. And my skin is my own. No ghosts to ride my bones now; no guest here uninvited, and yet..?

I was Nanrahamma. Through the Ghostline, I was her. The knowing’s a tether inside of me. The realisation is a rabbit snare round me. No longer is she one that is, but one who came before.

This silence is a distance they give me for now. The ghosts that rode my will dismount and give me time to mourn. But for all the rites I know, I don’t know how to start. I sit in the dirt. There is earth under my fingernails. My lungs have stopped their hitching but my face stays fresh with tears.

I have spent so long telling myself that death is not an ending — that death is not a loss.

I told myself that when my mother passed, it was the slow wasting that broke me – or a lack that was in me: unlearned, or else too young – and not the mere fact of it. That she was gone. No, not gone. Changed. Yet still gone where I couldn’t follow…

But aren’t I older now? And well-learned and wise? And can’t I follow now, a little? Haven’t I learnt to feel my way to the Waiting Door and just beyond?

Still it feels like something cut from me. A chunk chewed ragged from inside of me. And learned as I am, it’s a wound I don’t know how to heal.

 

 

_Time passes in what I wish was silence. Motion makes it worse. Movement through time or moving my body. The shattered bone grinds. I drag my leg. Every inchmeal step is sharp and slow: a drowning suffering thing. If I could think then I would think: Pain teaches; this is a lesson indented on me. But I cannot think, I cannot._

_I cannot. I cannot bear the light. I cannot bear the wind. It is too much to be awake and aware of myself. The pain of the hurt and the pain of healing is too much._

_I drag my useless body to a deep quiet place. A nock between rocks, grown over with heathers. It’s dry and small and tight-fit round me. I sing it safe, then sing myself to sleep. Like a cocoon it closes round me._

_I will wake starving-wasted and filthy, but whole. And until then, a mercy: I will see and hear and feel not a thing. Scarcely even dreams. A mercy, when being’s more than I can bear._

_So I do. And I wake. And all this that was – my broken leg and grinding mind – are long ago, long past. A memory, as this is becoming a memory. Is becomes was, as it always does._

 

 

“Reckoned I’d find you this way. Least if I kept at it long enough.” The voice is a purr, its texture fine-grinding. Not a good knife’s smooth edge, but more like the whetstone that made it that way. “Just didn’t know it’d be so easy. I’d say I’m surprised, and maybe I am, but then again it’s ‘bout time some skinny scrap of luck fell into my hands…”

This voice is one that likes to hear itself. It comes over me slow. I sense how it speaks like it knows me before I know it back. But as it speaks, I remember how I used to like listening to it almost as much as it liked speaking.

“Gotta say,” the voice continues, “for a scrap of good fortune you look pretty scrappy. Sujamma? Looks like you’ve been hitting the jar. Hard. Like, til it hit back harder…”

The rim of something redware touches my gum-closed lips and long fingers curl into the tangled back of my hair. A guiding hand offers my head up towards the bottle where it waits for my mouth to open.

I sniff and recoil, shunting back on my elbows before I can tell the scents I’m scenting. Spirits, and behind that, the starch and sweet cloy of hulled wickwheat, marshmerrow cores, mammet’s switch… These are things meant to heal bruises and breakages, but suspended in strong drink. But of course they are. Of course…

I stop my struggling. I have come back to myself and woken most of the way up. Gummed and difficult, I force my eyes into opening, and speak with a voice so sore and small I might as well have been shouting the black out of the night when last I used it. But when was that?

“I’m not hurt.” A croaking sound, embarrassing. Not hurt, I think: only scraped out and emptied, like the curt sad hull of a gourd. Tap me, I will echo. Strike me, I will crack. What have I missed? Time. I have lost time. No memory to fill the lack.

“Magicka?” he asks.

I nod, unsure. I am not looking at him but out across the dusty scape of crags and ridges ranged all round us. There is a shame lies heavy on me. I don’t want to look and see the shame’s in how he sees me.

“Got a tea for that. Hold on…”

He turns away and now I take my chance to stare, sidelong and birdish, with my one good eye.

He gnaws his lips raw while he works, like parts of his face misbehave their way into strange habit the moment his attention’s elsewhere. A twitch at his mouth’s crooked corner; a quirk in his eyebrows’ pale arch. He stalks round, tumbling together a pile of brushwood with one high-booted foot. He douses the heap with lamp-oil rather than wait for the wood to catch. He never had much patience, and I see that has not changed.

“Hold on,” he repeats, sharp more than soothing.

Under his breath he mutters a calling. I ought not to be surprised – not after all this time – but the ease of it shocks me still. Fist to his chest, open hand to the wood-pile, flames dance up towards his palm. The lamp-oil catches, quick as pouncing.

He sits down by the stuttering fire and tucks a willow-twist of longish white hair behind one ear. It’s cut has changed since last I saw him, but it’s not seen shears in some short while — half, from the temple down is cropped to a messy regrowth of fluff.

With sure hands and a leaf-bladed knife he shaves pieces of pink dried root into a little blackish kettle and pours in water. On instinct, my nose wrinkles.

“Guljana,” he explains, needless. “Ought to help.”

I nod and try to steady my face. His teas never were very good whenever they had a purpose beyond their taste, and already I smell overstrong horseradish, scoring the inside of my nose and throat. His alchemy has always been slipshod and haphazard; foul more often than not, and I see the years have not changed that either.

I also see this is not where last I was. A thrum of panic passes through me. I’m scared that I’ll wake up.

“Simra…” I say his name the way he doesn’t: long vowels, flicked ‘r’. It sounds like a greeting come late, but a request sits at its heart. I am still drifting, distrusting what I see and feel and think. “Where—..?” No. Start again. “ How did you find me?”

Anchor me. The now and the real, the real and the now. He touched me; despite himself he touched me; if this were real would he ever have—? Please, I don’t want to be dreaming.

“This morning?” says Simra. “Blind luck. And the ravens and racers fighting each other for who’d get to circle you. Not always the worst idea, taking cues from scavengers when you’re travelling...”

He speaks mixed Velothis and Dunmeris, flickering natural between settled and clansmer words and inflections. His knack for those two sister-tongues has gotten better, more fluent, though his accent still exiles him from ever sounding native.

“And before?”

“Before, I just…I mean, I’m no tracker. I listened to rumours. Took jobs. The kind I reckoned you’d pick up and follow. Or not jobs maybe so much as…problems you’d want to solve. And I just…kept at it.”

Perhaps, I think, he has scavenged together some patience after all. No mention of how long he searched and held out hope.

I think: I am glad he found me. If this were a dream, wouldn’t he be much the same as before? Not changed for the better? If this were a memory, wouldn’t it be familiar? Wouldn’t I know what he wants? How it ends?

 

 

_“I didn’t pay you three-hundred drakes straight silver for this shit, Junec! Three days, three nights, retching my guts out on the open sea, then you dump us out before Blacklight? Fuck that, you fucking parasite, you fucking ringworm, this is not what any one of us fucking paid for!”_

_“Sera, I’m hacked as you are to hear the news, but there’s nothing doing! I have cargo spoiling in the holds and oarhands that need paying. But be all what may be, the Cedarsnake is not a thrice-blighted blockade-runner!”_

_“Fuck your cargo, that’s your business. Your fucking oversight. Look, I’m sorry for your lost profits. Really I am. That’s a kick in the fucking teeth, right? Upside is, maybe you’ll be used to it by the time you give me my fucking money back!”_

_“Your—… What?”_

_“I’m sorry — what part of ‘count your losses you fucking louse there’s more where that came from’ did you not understand? I’m reopening negotiations. Now.”_

_Passengers disembark from the beached boat, sour and reluctant. One, speaking to its captain, is louder than most. A stone-throw down the shoreline, the woman who stores and counts the boat’s cargo talks to some other camp-follower. She is trying, I think, to sell as much as she can as best she’s able. Her and a dozen other ship’s captains and storekeepers. The same talk and the same scene, all down the ragged coast that blurs towards the Blacklight peninsula and the choke of its blocked off neck._

_“A quarter off then, sera. For a quarter of the journey still undone. That’s fair.”_

_“Fair? I’d call that robbery if I was feeling generous and the thing is, I’m not. Sick and tired and bone-sore and cheated is what I’m feeling. If I end up paying you a single fucking shilling, sera, it’s ‘cos I feel sorry for you.”_

_“I’ll give you back seventy-five drakes. No more.”_

_“You’ve got to be fucking with me. A hundred or I swear, the day I set foot in Blacklight’s the day I tell anyone who’ll listen how your grain’s cut with gravel and your taper-wax is half tallow. I’m a good liar, Junec – pray to your gods you don’t find out how good – but really, way you’re pissing on your passengers, wouldn’t surprise me if every story I told about you turned out true…”_

_I sit and watch the sea. That’s why I came here, through the crabbed and mazey camp and away, towards the coast where the ships make berth, unable to break into Blacklight. It’s hard not to listen but I don’t have to look. They squabble, these settled folk, over prices and pittances and things they’ll only waste. Nothing they need; things they could as soon give up; taking from one another whatever they can. Gouging, gouge and gouge._

_“Seventy, Junec, and a favour.”_

_All this is the first time I hear his voice. He is one of the gougers, the grubbers, coin-savage and revolting to me. Weeks pass before I do so again. Longer still before I see him as anything but what he is to me here, now, gouging._

 

 

“You want something,” I tell him through the gathering fog of our steaming teacups. Since first I met him, when he wore a lie for a name, Simra always has. He is one of those who is hungry even on a full belly. “What is it?”

His lips stretch into a thin flat line. Things move inside the close of his mouth; knit, grit, and shift. The scars change shape as I watch, and stop me from not watching. He thinks before he speaks.

“I needed you,” he says. Not ‘I wanted you.’ “What you can do. Your help. I needed your help…” It comes from him like a confession — a strange kind of shame. He says ‘I need you’ but means ‘I am not enough.’ “I mean, it’s with…” Simra gestures around us, over the crags and rills and drops of the highlands. I don’t know why. He’s referring to none of them but to something else. “…the sorta thing you do.”

My brows fraction up. I wait for him to go on.

“The dead,” he explains. Shame and discomfort muddle in him and wingclip his words before they fly free. “You’re a shaman.”

“A wisewoman,” I correct him. That other word is not one of ours.

“Right. I—…sorry. I’m shit with all this. Not got the first clue about the whole fucking lot. Just…” Something pleading flickers in his face and is gone. “I mean, as I understand it, you’ve got duties, right? They’re part of who you are. As a wisewoman?” He tries out the word in Velothis.

“I have duties, yes, to the dead. But we all do. It’s only that most choose to…not do them. Or see that they need doing.”

“Alright, alright, so…I need you to help me help you with your duties to them by helping me do mine.”

I frown. “You’re riddling. Tying your intentions up in knots til no-one can tell what end’s which. You think that’ll stop me telling. But seeing that’s what you want – what you’re trying to do – is enough. Simra…”

“What?”

“Why do you want this now? You never did before. Not in the five years since I met you, and not in all your life til then. You never much cared.”

“Try tell me I’ve not wanted it in those five years. You wouldn’t have a clue what I’ve wanted. You’ve been – what? – wallowing. Like this. In the filth of your fucking failure.” He takes a breath. His voice turned sharp and now he stops to see how deep a cut he’s made. And in my face it’s hard to hide. Perhaps that’s why he speaks softer after. “Maybe I’ve just got the same reason you do? I owe it. I wanna do right. I don’t know much about the dead – right – but I know about debt, and—”

“A wisewoman is bound, name and blood, to help them. You have no obligation. I…” Still shaken, I reach out to him with my senses. No song spools round him. No timbre lingers. No ghostline to link him back through time, the same as back when I met him. “You only want help for yourself. Or something they can give you, maybe. I won’t stay to be lied to, Simra.”

I try to stand, still holding my cup of tea. It spills as I stumble. It scalds my wrist as I slip. I am weak, even while I try to be stronger than the want that drives him. But up from where he crouched on the roots of his toes, he lunges to catch my fall. If this were real would he have touched me? Twice now. Who does he ever touch but to hurt them? One hand at my waist, one hand hard on my arm, his fingers dig — they bruise me. When does he touch but to hold on or hurt..?

“A favour then,” he hisses, urgent. “Don’t take coin, do you? So, I help you now, you help me later. Living to living. One Velothi to another.”

You are no clansmer, Simra Hishkari — I think it in silence but voice nothing of it. Instead I bow my head a little and say to him, “Perhaps.” What I mean is that I have no choice, and he scents it, like a wolf scents a wounded doe — like a slaughterfish scents blood in water.

“I know why you’re here,” he says, smirking cattish and crooked from ear to earlobe. “I dragged you out and away from a pile of corpses. Not saying I saved you this time. You’d done an alright job of that. All I’m saying’s that, next time, you might not be saved without me. Right?”

Even without the goad of coin, Simra talks like he’s striking a bargain. My insides cringe around his words and I cannot look his way. From him even an offer of help comes jagged and weighted like a threat.

“Bodies?” I say.

“Burnt them. Reckoned better that than have them come back again.” One hand, bloody-bandaged across the knuckles and up to the wrist, wrings anxious at a jangling brass something stitched into his swordbelt. “There something else I should’ve done? Shit. There was, wasn’t there? Rites or…something.”

I am only scared that I lost time. That I am walking in a dream — that would make sense of why nothing makes sense. “What bodies?” I manage. “‘Come back again,’ you said… Corpsewalkers?”

He frowns. He doesn’t know the word except in pieces. He gleans its meaning from the sum of its parts. “Might be.”

“Hands,” I mutter. “She has hands now. Reaching out. She found me. Widow’s tears — how long..?”

My gladness is done with. I wish Simra had stayed in the past. I wish he had not found me. I wish I had not needed him to, and had no need of him now. But if she’s raising hands to find and fight with, I’ll need a hand of my own.

 

 

_There is a crawling on the night’s blind skin._

_I laid no spells before sleep took me. No sigils set to rise up crying like flights of birds when they sight a raptor’s swoop. Sleep fell on me like a sudden rain and drenched me to my bones. I had no time — no strength to spend._

_All the same I feel the crawl. I am strung tight, wound up and resonant. I am an emptiness waiting to echo. Stretched thin and worn and ragged like this, I hear and see and feel more, til every instant exhausts me anew._

_But I can’t see through the dark. I am on my knees. Clumsy, a moment staggers past, and then I’m on my feet. I turn and turn. My one good eye scrapes a space around me. Wall-flat black borders, confine-close and tight, and tightening._

_I know what’s coming. I feel them now as I’ve felt them before: an audible reek; an unwashed itch in the marrow of me. But no familiarity could ever numb me to this. Knowing what’s coming does nothing to calm me. I am afraid._

_My hands go where they must. In my left I hold a scrap of safety, caged up in flint and bone and hair. I feel it stir the same as always. Like the seethe of smoke that comes from kindling as it catches, before the sparks show bright. My right hand thinks to go for my knife but I think better of it._

_The whole dark round me shudders to make the noises that they make. Like all the mechanisms of a body at once all grinding and, breathless, trying to speak. A sound like the scratching of unwelcome eyes – like being by force made unalone – but grown too harsh and strong to bear._

_I think: She has found me. At last she felt me on her trail and has broken backward to find me._

_My left hand twitches tighter. Still I hold back from calling, for all my fear and urging. I’ve fed my sivami too well down the years and it’s grown in ways I wish it hadn’t._

_But the corpsewalkers come. And like a flight of birds takes wing when just one bolts, what calm I had is gone._

_I ask into the darkness, as if for a favour, “Josket?” My voice comes shrill but the call runs true. I feel it like a hunger pang, months-starved and many-toothed. In the night I hear the first walker break and, joyless, I am thankful._

 

 

“We ought to go down. Get you a bath. Fed and watered.”

Simra crouches, sitting on his shanks. We share the risetop here, overlooking the dusk, the distant stripe of sea, and a huddle of lights crammed tight below us. The dim warm amber of oil-lamps, burning pale; the cold sometimes glow of magelights, in purple and red and vain bright blue. They gleam to life as we watch. They glimmer and go out and dance through the deepening shade.

“Veranistown’s a pit,” Simra goes on. “Grey bread, one crooked dog-leg of a street. A crowded cove where the fishermen spend so much time shouting at each other over who’s got first call on getting out of that cramp and onto the sea it’s a wonder they catch anything. Fucking wretched, but it’s better than staying out here…”

He’s talking to fill silence. Or else he’s talking just to hear himself — to assure himself of just how much he knows.

“I can’t.” I hear myself say it, but all my mind will let me do is watch the lights til I’m full of their glow and can go on thoughtless, thoughtless…

I feel him look at me. “You sure? You look chewed up and spat out…”

I nod. I’m sure. I agree.

“I could go..? Get us something to eat, at least. You wouldn’t need to come…” His gaze lets up as he looks out across the small lake of lights once more. “Second thought, fuck it, we can—… Let’s see what we can do, right?”

He jerks to standing and brushes three kinds of nothing from his jacket shoulders, his wrap-sleeved forearms, the knees of his high-bound boots.

I would thank him, but instead I think: This is not for me. This is not care or kindness. He only fears to lose me, and with it what he wants from me.

 

 

_I do not try to grasp the why. One small House suffering to starve another small House back down to size, laying siege and surround to Blacklight, where that second small house rules the larger House they share. That’s how someone tried to explain it. But these are settled-mer squabbles. House politics. I see only the camp, and closest to the city walls, the soldiers that started it._

_They are Redoran. Packs of the shielded rank and file in stiff blocky plates of raw bonemould. They are clumsy, but their betters move like they were born to this — clad like crabs in the harsh hinged architecture of their armour, flexible, painted with lacquer. Under that they are robed like war too is ritual. They prowl their camp with long pole weapons, long sharp stares._

_It’s for them I stay away, in the seethe and jostle of the followers’ camp hung onto theirs, and sprawling a long mad ways inland. And it’s for them that I’m glad to be leaving._

_To the camp, the followers, the Redoran, it’s only skin to shed. The soldiers are the bones beneath all this and all the rest is flesh. Sloughed off daily, healed back daily in comings and goings, constant as skin. Our numbers now are only part of this._

_Guars for the pack and guars for the saddle tread careful through the rich black mud. Handcarts and pull-wagons struggle after. Pilgrims, coarse-robed and barefoot. Traders and hopefuls and settlers, weighed down by the worlds they carry and drag with them._

_I travel light, like I always travel light. Already our slowness itches at me but that’s what comes of our numbers. Massed with travelers, flanked with coin-paid guards, the caravan goes along like something shelled, wearing its bulk like armour. And the way is long and strange and harsh, even before the landbridge. And hopeful I think: Alone I would fail. Together we’re a tempting morsel too big for the world to swallow._

_But already I hear the coughing throats and troubled lungs. Already each sound and step is a struggle. And it will grow worse towards Vvardenfell._


	3. Chapter 3

_“Be cold soon.”_

_“What?”_

_“I said it’ll be cold soon. My first Winter in Morrowind and all, so I’m no expert but…seems like it’ll get cold.”_

_“N’chow…S’cold already.”_

_“This? Cold? I spent a season snowed into the mountains, in the hillfort of a bandit clan, stuck slap on the border between here and Skyrim. A Winter so cold no fire would take. You ever tried burning something already frozen solid? Trust me, we tried plenty, but no joy. We had to drink the blood of goats to keep warm. Not something I’d recommend you do for giggles but it was the only choice we had. By Spring every coat in the herd had turned white for how bad we’d bled the poor things…”_

_“You’re tugging my tail. What’s a clan of bandits want with goats?”_

_“Meat? Milk? Wool? Skins? Light fucking entertainment?”_

_“Milk? From a goat? Sheogorath’s madness, I swear, Kath — you’d sell guarshit and call it glass.”_

_“And there are cullers in this world who’d buy it if I did.”_

_The fat guard laughs a high grating laugh. The one with the heavy jowls, the slabs of arm and slab of belly, who looks at me with envy in his eyes. The other only smiles his crooked smile and runs a hand preening through his strange hair: mud-black all over but grown ash-white at the roots._

_“Y’know…” the fat guard begins as his laugh lets off, “I’ve never seen a goat.”_

_“Somehow, Hlasil, I’m not surprised. Ghosts and bones though, it’s probably for the best — they’re huge things, like kagouti but with fur and four legs. You’d scream yourself mute.”_

_“…says the n’wah who’s never seen a kagouti.”_

_“Tsscht…”_

_I walk ahead and out of earshot, striking a hard pace til I’m panting. I slip between wagons and through the mud of their wheeltracks. I pass one trapped in the rut of the ones already gone by. And on our caravan’s far flank, I feel safer, away from the guard’s high harsh laugh and the knife-edged eyes. They are one of many hired on to protect us. So why does their stare make me feel unsafe?_

 

 

I come from my yurt a time after dawn. Inside has a scent so much its own that I scent it no longer. I suppose it smells of me. Outside is a crowded chaos of aroma and colour. The air gapes open, cackling with the sound of racers. And Simra is there, already awake.

We made camp in a shale-floored gulley, cracked down into the hard dirt and coastal rocks of this land. He huddles like an idol half-sitting in an alcove, narrow and shallow, with his long legs curled up to his chest. He is eating. Pressed flowers, I think at first, and almost giggle at how it jars with his manner — rag-edged slips of tawny orange, thin as thick paper and shaped like sunbursts.

“Persimmon?” he asks. There is a book in his lap. His eyes do not rise. “Not the good kind but they’ll do. Want one?”

His voice is flat and absent. Annoyed perhaps at how I’ve interrupted him. Being first or last awake is always a clean bold feeling — a way to feel alone with what little of the world has not slipped away, and feel what’s left is yours. I know that. I’m almost sorry.

“C’mon,” he says, voice still neutral. “Breakfast’s important.”

The shale kreck-krecks underfoot as I walk over. I try to make my face smile as I take the slip of dried fruit from his bandaged hand. It’s easier to smile now I have its taste on my tongue — it seems like the good kind to me. A black-tea faint bitterness, and stiff at first, then melting-soft in the wet of my mouth. By the time I speak it’s almost dissolved.

“Did you sleep well?”

“I slept enough. I get bored otherwise.”

Perhaps he slept little but he’s still yet to get up. His mantle’s shrugged tight round his shoulders and the tangle of his sleeping-skin half-covers his torso, thighs, hips — all but the high muddy scuff of his rag-wrapped boots. He doesn’t ask how I slept so I give him no answer. But I was plagued by dreams and am still scarce half awake.

“Tea,” Simra says. It’s not a question.

He closes the book, slides it into the mouth of a sackbodied waxed leather satchel, then draws it shut. His hand lingers a moment, protective over the shapes that fill it, but soon he’s struggling from his bedding, and soon he’s rousing last night’s fire back to life.

His kettle was set by his side as he slept. He always leaves it that way, crouched like an idol in handsreach, and I’ve yet to guess why. But now he lays it on the flames. Slow, its black flanks start to blush red. Simra chews another slice of dried persimmon as he works. The tea he brews is strong and black. He unwraps a pearshaped bulb of set brown sugar from a scrap of plain silk. Precious, say his even careful hands. Precious, says the knife he takes to its sides, shaving even slivers off and into the simmering pot.

“Five years…” I test the span of time on my tongue. Talking to him came easy once. I try to try again; fill in the empty-grown gaps. “Have you spent them all in Morrowind?”

He nods. “Why?”

“Your taste’s still too sweet for it.”

“For Morrowind?” He kisses his teeth then bares them in a humourless grin. “I’ll never pass for anything but an outlander, will I? So why pretend to buy into all the piss and vinegar you’re all so proud of? Like I’m ever gonna impress some high House lord by taking my tea bitter…”

“That’s not what I meant.”

“Then what did you mean?”

“Only…that you might find your time here more pleasant if you learnt to enjoy it on its own terms?”

“Tsscht. D’you see me itching to escape?”

“…No.”

“Then maybe don’t stab out a guess that it’s too ‘unpleasant’ for me, right?”

“…I’m only curious why you stay.”

He falls silent a moment. I watch his closed mouth work. “For a start, nowhere else has persimmons.”

I think: That’s not true. I know a place. Or else I remember a place…

“Not this cheap, at any rate.” He pours me a cup of tea, then one for himself.

“But you don’t like these ones?” I let the tea warm my sleep-stiff face.

“I didn’t say that. Not-the-best is better than none. I just…” His voice crackles into quiet laugh, like dry wood taking flame, shuddering as it splits. “…I just prefer the sweeter ones.”

“I had thought you might.”

“Dried whole, y’know? Flesh like heavy-set honey. Thick, round, indenting in the middle at the stem like—” He tails off, dumbfounding himself.

“A navel?”

“…Not what I was thinking but…” Simra give a short cough. “That’s better. Yes.”

He laughs. I laugh too, not because I understand, but because he is laughing.

 

 

_“You…”_

_The voice alone makes me flinch. The fact that I know it — that needles part of me with a small skittish fear before I even sense the slur in it._

_“Yeah, you! Little Red!”_

_I turn away too sharp and fast to pass it off as accident. I walk faster, stumbling to duck between wagons, into any other part of the night._

_“Hey! I’m talking to you!”_

_Mid-pitched, that voice, and stretching almost high as it strains against the leash its owner tries to put on it. Yet for all its almost-softness, its unbroken almost-sweetness, it has the same bark and panic in it I’ve fled from all my life. Sneering shouting leching Nords in Windhelm’s streets and baying on its docks. Redoran guards, skinned of their solemnity by drink and boredom, and hate, and hate…_

_I break into a run._

_“…question…got a question for you…” The wind in my hair and on my ears takes bites from what’s said and leaves it in pieces. “…just…something I wanna know…Hey!”_

_A hand on my shoulder. Its grip yanks me round. The soft heavy sag of Hlasil’s face is inches from my own. Wind-tanned, coarse-skinned, hairless from chin to cheek and brow to scalp. He hefts another hand onto me, holding me still._

_“What I wanna know’s what makes you so special?”_

_His mouth is open, breathing on me. The air all round me tastes thick and starched sour with mazte. A twist of slack wet lipflesh; he is talking again. I turn my head so as not to look._

_“S’the knife, isn’t it? S’what we share. Got you like they got me, didn’t they? Hey? I said didn’t they?”_

_“I don’t know.” I manage to say. It comes out as a croak. “I don’t know what—…Who? I don’t know…”_

_I should be more than this, stronger than this. Wise and well-learned and with spells in my power to make sure no-one touches me, to make sure no-one touches me like this, to make sure no-one is like this with me ever again. Instead the hands reach deeper than just holding me. They make me small. I cower, like experience has taught me to cower._

_“Your lot. Your kin. The clans, down on the plains. Made you a knife-nemer too, didn’t they? I can tell, don’t say a thing, I can tell…”_

_Hlasil spits as he speaks. I can feel the words wet on my cheek. Or am I weeping? I’ve tried to take that word inside me – nemer – make it mine so it won’t hurt me. Now it gnaws, hurting worse from within than without._

_“Me, they did it back not long after they leashed me. Back when I was a boy.” The laugh. A sawing grating sound, dry in all the wet slur of their words. “Just a farmer’s son, so who was to care that I got raided away by the Vereansu? No-one’s who — not enough to try get me back. It was the men made a slave of me, but the women who used the knife. And the tongs, and the spells, and the herbs…”_

_It is worse, knowing now what he means. It is worse now I pity him, alongside the fear, and the starved and buried hate._

_“Didn’t wanna chance any stay-put slave blood ending up mixed in with theirs, they said. But I reckon they did it for spite. Just cos they could. You though… Why’d they do it to one of their own? Make you into a pretty knife-wife for some khan, that it?”_

_Hlasil tangles a braid of my hair round his thick fingers and pulls. And his voice is bitter, and his voice is sad. I am trying not to be. To become nothing — not me, not here._

_“That’d explain it. How you ended up a special case. Looking sweet and slim while I got like this. Like all they cut out of you was the ugly… So tell me. Go on, share. How’d they do it?”_

_An anger so thick in my throat I can’t speak. I let it burst so I can breathe. I push, hands against the meat of his chest, his paunch, the sour-sweat presence of his. A bruise begins to form at my shoulder as Hlasil holds on, shouting now, questions I don’t let myself hear. I make a fist and beat against him. Because I can’t speak, I scream._

_The grip lets up, then shifts. A hand the size of my head wraps frantic round my throat. Now not even screams will come._

_Josket wakes up inside me too late. It sends my head turning, trying for something to bite. It rakes my nails down a face I’ve got too blind now to see._

_And then I’m buckled up, twisted on the ground, wrenching in breath after breath til my lungs are in love with the work that they do. The next face I see is not Hlasil’s. The next voice I hear is foreign but familiar, echoing into my life this time, and before, and before, again and again, so why is it—?_

 

 

I wake again in the night-warmth of my yurt. I am all shudders, all sweat, and crawling cringing skin. Sometimes it’s kinder to dream my way into lives not my own. I would rather have been Nanrahamma, my mother, anyone else than remember the night that Simra saved me. Or so it seems right now.

One side of my yurt holds a washbowl, sweet-smelling oils, a broken-toothed comb. I wash myself, and I wash myself, and I wash myself til clean…

Outside I find the dawn on its way. This morning, I am first awake.

Simra sleeps sitting up, leant both shoulder and cheek against a chokeweed shrub. When he wakes, its bark will have marked his face, and the dark and waxy velvet scent of its ferns will hang on him. Like the scent of stoneflowers, spicebark, amber-smelling incense now hangs on me, suspended in the oil I dabbed at my wrists, temples, underarms and stomach…

He breathes soft. Sometimes one corner of his mouth will twitch. His hands clench and unclench, and his fingertips trace lines on his palms. But I think he’s sleeping sound for now. Sleeping deep enough that, this morning, I am the one who makes the tea.

 

 

_“You’re an ashlander,” he says. It’s an ordinary inroads. Like nothing that happened last night ever happened. Except that now the expedition goes on without Hlasil — what good is a caravan guard with a broken leg?_

_At first when he speaks, I think to shrink away. Sudden words and recognition — a silence split, like a stonehammer bird cracking into the shell of my skull to pick at what’s inside. He walks on my blindside. My neck has to crane right round just to see him clearly._

_He sees something in my wide and staring eye that makes him mirror me. I do not think it’s kindness that makes him move off a step, two steps, as we walk through dust turned slurried by rains. Still I’m grateful for the mercy of it._

_I see him better after that. He is young and almost smiling. Dark and wild his hair, but whitening at the roots. Sharp as slate his face, but different by daylight…_

_“It’s written on you,” he says, gesturing at his own face. “They’re like mine.” He dances a few steps ahead of me, to see my face in full. No, not my face — my harrowmarks. “Different too. Here and here…”_

_I had not seen his marks at first. They are newer than mine, though fainter too, not brought out starker by rubbings of salt and soot like mine. They look riteless, wrong._

_“I don’t know how to read them,” he admits. “Never got told. But I know they’re there for reading. For meaning things. Aren’t they?”_

_His Dunmeris is clumsy at the corners, its phrasings so unnatural they edge accidental into poetry. Still he seems proud he can speak it at all, and by his Grey Quarter accent, perhaps it’s a wonder that he can. So many in the Quarter failed to learn any one of their old homeland’s tongues, adopting instead a newer, easier mongrel one._

_I’ve not spoken a word yet. Only looked at him and listened. Every time a silence comes, he talks into it, like he fears what it might fill with if he only left it empty. For all his easy confidence he’s restless as I am._

_“What do yours mean?” he asks, like he’s daring some great thing. Like there might be a line and he may have just crossed it._

_“If you were a clansmer, you’d know. Are you?” I ask, even though I already know the answer. That is conversation, I think._

_“I…don’t have a clan, no.”_

_I am frowning before I know that I have frowned. “Then who sent you Harrowing?” He is of an age where it might have been recent. I have been in and out of the Morayat these last few years, and though sometimes my eye goes faceblind, I feel I should know him if he’s what he claims to be. “Who marked you?”_

_“My ammu.” Is this the answer to both questions or only one of the two?_

_I ask myself what his mother was. There are tribes that let wisewomen bear and birth children of their own; other tribes that name as ammu any woman that raises and cares for a child. It’s not so strange that she should be both a mother and a wise-one. Noor and Nanrahamma and Tanet were all, in their ways, my mothers._

_But I look at his marks. The curve like one horn of a moon, down from his left eye, scored along its inside edge with a retinue of small round stars. Meaningless. The other line – its strange mirror, and a strange mirror of my own – curling up from the right corner of his mouth, along one cheek. Meaningless. The deep jag of scar tissue through the left side of his mouth is the only one that speaks of something. It’s not a clanmark, nor a harrowmark, but it has more in common with the others than he thinks — just as artless; just as unkind._

_I think I see the truth of it. Knives against his face to teach him nothing but pain. To score him with nothing but scars. If his mother were a wisewoman she should have known better, and if she was not then she should never have tried to mark him at all._

_“That wasn’t good of her,” I say, soft. If I could say sorry for the things that others have done, I would._

_Too quick his lip curls. He kisses his teeth. “My ammu knows what she’s about,” he says, knife-cold. What he wants to say is: You know nothing of me, nor of my mother. And he is right._

_And yet I know the sudden violence of his kindness. The lash-out passion of his mercy. When I was a stranger, he crippled someone who was almost his friend to save me…_

_And I’ve heard this voice before as well. Or have I heard this voice in mine when I spoke to those who spoke of my mother? Do I know him after all, or only know his anger, having felt the same one myself? I cannot trust myself to know. People do not seem so separate now as they used to._

_“What do I call you?” I offer._

_“Katharas,” he says. “Katharas Ruvaen.”_

_“No,” I frown, shake my head, look sidelong across the wide and many-footed trudge of our caravan. “That’s not it. Why would your mother give you harrowmarks and a settled-folk name?”_

_“Tsscht…”_

_But then why question it? I know nothing of him, nor of his mother, except perhaps that she was cruel._

_“You can call me Tammunei.”_

 

 

We are underway now, and have been almost a week. We are on her trail, full force and full speed, to find her where she’s hidden.

Simra walks quick, stepping hard til he has to stop. Great leg-stretching paces, lunging uphill and skidding fast down, a livid constant loping. He walks like a city-dweller, always with somewhere to be and no patience in when he gets there. And I suppose that suits him; matches his temper. I like to think, by contrast, I walk like a nomad: slower but certain, and steadier, a pace I can keep up forever. But there is also the simple matter of his legs being longer than mine.

“So you can – what? – hear her?”

Simra pauses at the top of a scree-scattered slope and asks down as I struggle up. A bone of breathlessness hides in his voice and he crouches, leaning over his knees, to wait til I’m caught up.

“I can hear them,” I say, picking my way towards him. “And they mostly talk about her.”

“‘Them’ being…ghosts?”

“The dead of this land, yes. Rite-bound to it. Or riteless, so they get trapped instead.”

I look to him and think I see a flinch of guilt flash over his face. Horror at himself. I think: How many has he thrown to that fate? Bodies left out for wild nix and the beaks of racers, souls left waiting for someone to mourn them.

“How do they know where she is?” he says after a misstep moment.

“They don’t. And they do. They—… Hm.”

Simra cocks his head, still curious, waiting.

“She’s taken pieces of them. The Ghostlines from here to the hills and into the mountains.”

“So it’s like…they can still feel the pieces where they are, a little? Like someone who lost a leg still feeling it itch?”

“…No. Not that. Those parts are lost to them, she’s made sure of that. More like, to get them, she had to make them let her in. So they know her. As if she was a descendent of theirs, and they’re her Ones Before. Like she stole a place in all their Lines when she stole what they knew and the power they had.”

Simra crooks a strange half-smile. “That what she wanted then? Family on the other side, and she’d get it by any means?”

“No!” I say, sharp and disgusted as I crest the slope and stand beside him. “She’s like any punarigash. Any malkuthikaushi! She defiles the dead and defiles herself for power. Because she is so sick it makes her hunger for things no-one should take nourishment from.”

“Punarigash…” He repeats the word to himself, testing it. Another word whose parts he knows but has never heard compounded. “S’that what that word means? Someone – a mage – who takes power—”

“From rot.” I almost spit it. The hate is tiring to hold. I try to stop. I try to speak softer. “Can we stop for a while? I need to ask them where from here.”

Simra nods, frowning, and turns away. “I’ll look around. See what our surroundings have to say for themselves.”

I think what he means is that he will keep watch. That he will protect me, knowing that I’ll be lost to the living while I go in my mind among the dead.

But he always claims to be keeping watch, even when I’m able to keep at least half of one for myself. It makes him feel useful, active, other than idle — whatever Simra’s doing, I think, he can’t stand just to stop.

So I don’t stop him.

I don’t stop him when he parts from me, a hundred times a day, to go beyond speech, and to range where only shouting can reach him. We are always in view of each other, more or less, but travel mostly in our separate solitudes. Sometimes I think I see his lips move, as he walks along some high ridge, or scales up some towerish stack of stone for vantage. And he’s a good climber, though the mess it puts on his palms makes him seem like a bad one. Skinned by rough rocks, I would offer to mend them if I thought he’d let me. But I don’t, so I don’t, so I don’t…

And I don’t stop him when he comes back to me, and can hardly talk for the number of words that tumble from his mouth, trying all at once to be heard. Stories; snatches of things he’s heard the locals say, in the towns and hamlets and outposts that grow these days as lichen does in this part of the mainland; asking me the name of plant after plant, and the words for things he can’t name himself in Dunmeris, Velothis, or any split tongue of either. Anything to keep from discussing the sharp bare fact of what he wants from me.

Nor do I stop him when it comes to the part of the night when he writes, and I know he wants only silence.

Now it’s into my own silence I go. Incense bitter and heady, smoking in the dish before me. These thoughts I think are like the half-dreams that come before full dreaming. The half-thoughts that come before sleep.

 

 

_The corpsewalkers come. Her groping hands, her searching eyes, spread across bodies, how many, how many..?_

_The first makes two steps, three steps. If it touches me, I think; if it touches me… But it’s dragged back by jaws of bristling smoke and limbs of twitching shadow. My sivami strikes and I taste rot on my tongue. The slide of meat in my empty throat._

_But the next comes on all fours, slopebacked and searching with a questing head. She has made it into something it wasn’t. More like a nix-hound now than the corpse it was. Its arms and legs are jointed wrong in ways that would hurt a living body but make a dead one quicker. My good eye turns on its empty eyes and through its sockets I know she sees me._

_I touch it, then: the mind that makes them move one-minded, like a shoal at sea or a murmuration black against the white broad sky. She’s come to see what I am. She’s come to test what I’m for. So, I think: Show her._

_From my throat I sing a curse I’d place on no living feeling creature. In fear it’s the first spell I can fully grasp. I don’t watch as the bones bend and twist beyond their current twisting, but I know the shape I’ve sung it into. Dead-spidering limbs, in-curled, its rigid parts ingrown._

_Still I feel more of them – the pack, the shoal – and I’ve spent more of myself already than was wise. I tell myself, whatever happens now, I know what happens after. The comfort is numbing. I almost want it. To be one with what, in life, I can barely glimpse, and know Nanrahamma once more…_

_Slower corpses amble in, their motions all an awful unison. Like a troupe of dancers I saw once, all veil-faced and bare-limbed… Around me they close like they are all one hand forming a fist. One hand, one mind, one close of grasping fingers. They will crush and tear me._

_“Josket.”_

_It chokes out. A whisper. If my sivami is the beast in me, what’s more animal than the urge to live? The wind whimpers and growls. Flesh tears and bone breaks. Still there are more than my sivami has teeth or claws._

_I turn and turn – a circle beginning to break – cursing my half-blind eye, my narrow and narrowing vision. Eyeless eyes and groping limbs, skin leathern like dried fruit. I close my eyes and listen._

_The song that thrums in all of them’s a thing fearfilled as me. A breath like something fleeing and feeble. It hangs heavy on her, the anathema she’s forced herself into. She is strained, weak, scared. If I can only silence the song…_

_I speak the Empire’s tongue – a broad-catching net of a language – to make sure she understand me, whoever she may be:_

_“I see you. Beyond the eyes you sent to watch. The hands you sent to catch.” Effort in my voice. A gathering strain as I reach for the will beyond the corpsewalkers’ bodies. “You know what I am. I speak for them, and with their voice I say they are not yours.”_

_There, the dark sick root that binds them together. I feel it. I grasp and it recoils._

_“Out,” I whisper._

_The strain I’ve gathered goes out from me. Like letting fly an arrow, all the toil is in drawing back the string. A flicker of fading strength. The root uproots. The binding comes unbound._

_Bodies slacken and slump around me. Too weak to stand, too frail to breathe, I fall, and in the dust I join them. The last thing I remember is racers overhead. Daylight. A face marked meaningless, but familiar to me. He has rings in one ear, a rip in the other, where once they were both unpierced. His hair is both longer and shorter. Strange, I think… Strange…_

 

 

“Simra?” I call out. “Simra?” Louder now. My body has forgotten that a shout is not always a scream.

“You alright?”

I am shaking. My joints feel wrong and my limbs are stiff. Cold and tender with feeling come-again bruises that’ve long since healed in the here and now.

“I was there again,” I manage to say, as he draws close enough to hear. “Where you found me. I know now. I know…”

“You mean you saw her?”

“Felt her. I can feel her now. I…” I swallow and wrap my arms around myself so he won’t see how my hands shake. “I can find her.”


	4. Chapter 4

_We skirt the coast. To our right hills rise from the autumn mist. Beyond them, unseen, are mountain peaks and mountain ranges and folk who range the mountains. Our leader knows it too. So we stay in view of the sea, and for reasons beyond just sparing the wheels on our wagons._

_Towns slide by. We resupply. Some migrants among us slough off, settle down, sooner than they’d thought, but happy perhaps in Low Silgrad, Garanmorad, Veranistown, and more and more. Wanderers and refugees turned farmers and fishermen, keepers of shops, makers of pots… There are any number of outposts, hamlets, and shackbuilt riverside claims we pass. Most are too young to have names._

_“Seems for every one who drops out, two more fall in.”_

_“Green youngsters, born on barren land and without the brawn or bull-netch force of will to work til it’s rich again? Why shouldn’t they sign on, hoping Vvardenfell holds better things? Elders who still remember how things were, and wonder just how close things are to still being the same? Why shouldn’t they? And the pilgrims…”_

_“Well and good, well and good, but my point is, how many’s enough?”_

_“You mean how many’s too many?”_

_“I mean how many more can we take before we’re too slow to be an expedition anymore? Before we’ve got too many hopefuls for our guards to protect?”_

_“I’ll tell you when we find out. For now, you’d do well to remember that every new head among us is another dram in our venture’s pocket, hm? Up front, no refunds or renegotiations. Does a little more coin in your pocket really sound like such a bad thing?”_

_The caravan leader speaks to her second. I overhear, not able to help but listen._

_She sits on the bowed wooden hood of her cart. Its sides are scuffed paint and stretched hides over bones of curving wood. Where she’s perched, a kind of saddle is carved, fronted like a boatprow. It makes her whole cart look like a ship to sail cross-country in, drawn by two guars she treats stern and sweet as children._

_Her head and limbs and body are wrapped in cloth. The gape of every sleeve or foothole she has bound in with ties of leather. She is dressed for deeper farther travels, later down the line. Dressed against dust and ashfall, and dressed against the night-frosts she and I and her second all seem to know are well on their way now. I am bundled in a thick grey overcloak with a blue-green border for just the same reason. Others in the caravan have not had the same foresight. A small voice in my mind worries that, come full-Winter, they will freeze in their sleep._

_“I’m only saying,” her second begins. “We’ll hit the Plains soon. You know what that means.”_

_The second is a type all gristle and grit. Every move they make chits and clicks with the sound their chitinscale shirt makes, under their own long cloak. Their saddle-guar plods long-legged beside the leader’s cart._

_Next to them, the leader is older yet ageless, head shaved smooth, eyes bright. To the caravan as a whole, she said, her age must show in how she can lead us. She’s one who made this journey, in reverse, near enough two centuries ago. I stay quiet when she says it. She’s a loud and competitive talker, and I’ve no wish to compete. All the same, I’ve made this same journey too, more recent than her. Parts of it in my own flesh and on my own feet. All of it, over and over, in my dreams, and wearing skins other than my own. Through the dead, I’ve lived it._

_“It means,” she says, “that our guards’ll be earning their pay at long last.”_

_“And what about our travellers? The ones with knives and hooks and scythes and staffs and blighted-near-to-nothing else. They’ll split first Vereansu they see.”_

_“I’m counting on it.”_

_“Oh. Oh..!”_

_“Right.”_

_I respected her at first – our leader – and was glad to follow her. I respected her age and the way she seemed half a nomad herself. I made note of her name when I thought it was worth something. Dolmesa. Now I see she’s much like so many of the others. Prospectors and profiteers, come less to heal a dying land than to feed on the carcass before it’s a corpse._

 

 

“Tammunei?”

“Yes?”

“You’ve…” Simra struggles a moment, trawling for the right words, “been here a long time. Haven’t you? Longer than me, I mean.”

“I was born near here.” I nod to confirm it. “In the mountains between here and Cyrodiil.”

I remember the pass. The mountains’ bare faces, black and snowless in Summer. I remember the birth-pangs — I felt them when I was my mother, suffering to birth myself. But how can I explain these things to someone who’s only themself?

Simra troubles with himself for a short time in silence. His face is unsettled, all shadows and rounds of warm light from the nightfire he’s set. He stirs something strong and salty and red into the rice and yams he’s cooking. By its smell, it’s one of the mixtures the settled Dunmer leave urned in stone outside their stonebuilt houses, to go half-rotten and sweet, pungent as musk. From the morsel he coaxed out of the jar, the whole contents of the pot turns a sullen red.

“And before that,” he says. “You’ve seen things from before you were born as well. In visions, you told me once. Dreams. Right? That’s…more of Morrowind than most people see in a lifetime.”

“Some of it’s not very clear… Sometimes it’s just glimpses.”

But yes, I think: lifetimes on lifetimes I’ve lived, and lifetimes live in me. Though here they’re not so loud. We have left the sea behind. I wish the one we seek had not travelled so far inland again. This path is more familiar to me than to any one of my ancestors.

“I… Right. I know. Or – I mean – I kinda—… That’s still so much more than—…” Simra falters. Why is the thing he’s trying to say so hard for him to speak? He, who’s usually so swarming with words. “I just wanna know something. Got a question and, I mean, you’ve got better tools than most to give me some kind of answer.”

I bow my head at him, telling him: continue.

“Here’s the thing. Is it – you know – getting better?”

“Am I—?” Something inside me soars then swoops. “Oh. Here. Things here?”

“Yeah. Maybe it’s stupid. Probably is. But we came this way, didn’t we? Before. I remember. And things look just the same, right? Same hard rocks and thirsty shrubs, then sprawling useless scrubland. Empty. But that’s gotta be better than some things, right? Than ten years ago maybe? Twenty? A hundred. Even just a bit?”

Dead, he thinks. I realise that now. All this is deadland to him. Used to cities as he is, all wilderness is useless unless it’s being used. He doesn’t hear the ants that work beneath the earth. He doesn’t feel the moving world in every breath of wind. He only wants to know: When will mer live here again and call this patch of land their own? Is this land healing, or only taking a very long time in dying?

“Things have been worse,” I say. “Is that what you wanted to know?”

“Yeah…” He frowns. “Yeah, I mean… There’s more people these days. People like you, coming back. People like me, seeing it all for the first time. Desperate or hopeful or whatever else besides. People say it’s like Narsis grows another district every year that passes. Not enough planning, not enough space, so it’s…it’s slums on slums in a mess of islands but…I saw it. And all I thought was, fuck, it’s alive, right? Growing.”

He stops to spoon our dinner into two redware bowls. His packs and pockets are full of things like this. Bowls and spoons and tinderboxes; brooches of jet; empty phials and wax-sealed jars and hidden caches of coinage. Every protrusion set tight into the nook of something else: joint and socket, close and clever. Far more than he needs, and far more than he could ever leave behind.

“And you want to know if they have any right to be hopeful?”

“Maybe, yeah.”

“People always have the right. And maybe those in the cities – the settled-folk – think they have more right than most. But in the cities or in the wilds — it makes little difference. It’s what they do with their hopes…”

“Work, then? That’s what it comes down to?”

“And the whims of the gods and the aid of the ancestors and how well people listen to either. Yes.”

“Shit…”

“Things have been worse, Simra.” I say it like a hand laid over his hand, but I don’t reach out to touch. “The Houses always do well for themselves, one way or another.”

 

 

_Omayni is our last stop before we leave the sea behind. It doesn’t touch the water but looks out over it, haughty from its high promontory. Seaside cliffs. A high and racing wind._

_“Whose is it?” Katharas asks me, as if I should know. “Any of it.”_

_Our caravan clusters at the roots of the rise. What carts and wagons we have left form a broken bulwark round us, and round the jagged dirtpath that leads up to the town._

_“No-one’s,” I answer. “Or theirs. Or its own.”_

_“Strange…” Katharas’ brows knit but his mouth forms a smile, like something has pleased as much as confused him. “Suppose that’s why.”_

_He points up to the heavy shape at Omayni’s heart. A squat and slope-walled stronghouse sits the tall rock’s peak. Slit windows let the dark inside squint out, as if from half-lidded eyes. A narrow path leads out from it, walled on one side, a sheer drop towards the sea on the other. At the path’s end stands a tower of clay and stone cladding, both lighthouse and watchtower._

_“That’s Omayni,” he says. “Up there. I mean — so’s the rest, right, sure…” The blind huts and clumped lodges that cling to the rocks and huddle down the cliffs towards us. The trailing curtain of drystone wall, low and ramshackle, more to keep the goats and guar in than anyone out. The marketplace in the keep’s stout shadow. The paddies of saltrice scattered amongst the tidepools in the shallow lands below. “But without it, Omayni’d just be somewhere fishermen swap fish and salt and rice for leather and meat and milk, and herders trade meat and milk and leather for fish and salt and rice, right? Or it’d be under the thumb of some bandit or lord, and getting squeezed either way. That up there’s what keeps Omayni belonging to itself.”_

_I think: But what about the other towns and hamlets we’ve seen, crowded along the coast? Whose are they except their own? None of them had a stronghouse to overshadow them…_

_I think: Once everything belonged to one House or another, great or small. Or else to a clan, or else to both, in concord or conflict from season to season. It’s the Red Year that sundered all that, and filled the land with swathes of nothing that no-one has wanted til now. And I wonder: Is it better that someone wants it?_

_We walk the dirtpath now, together, between the huts and into the market. It’s easier to bear the eyes and the sound when I’m in company. And I am. I have Simra with me, who’s confident in places like these._

_I remember now when I first heard him, grubbing scraping and gouging for coin like all the others outside Blacklight. But when he uses that same voice to buy us each a skewer of tender fatty grilled eel, stained yellow with spice, and served over a bowl of slate-grey saltrice, I don’t mind it half so much._

_Or I think I don’t. But why do I know his name already? Katharas wasn’t yet Simra to me — not in Omayni. And why has his hair turned white? Dream or memory, I’ve long since lost trust in myself to tell the difference._

 

 

“Can you stop?”

I come to. Still and silent, I go stiff, like a hare in the jaws of a fox. Without knowing what it is I’ve stopped, I stop it. A rise of hot colour bridles my neck and stings in the tips of my ears.

“Sorry.” I look down at my clumsy hands and the shards of clay I hold in my fingers. I don’t remember picking them up but the ground here must be riddled with them. Sown, I think, like scattered seeds — the scavenged legacy of a harvest that burnt in its fields. “Stop what?”

“I…” He frowns. “That. What you were doing.”

“Singing?”

“I didn’t hear any. Just…something else.”

His frown deepens. He huffs out a sigh. The wooden stem of his dip-pen taps and taps and taps against the edge of the book he writes in. Restlessness hangs on him like the scent of smoke, and with every breath he takes more of it in. His mouth sets into a small hard line. It blossoms into a grimace as his shoulders give a shudder.

“Cold,” he says, like the word leaves a bad taste on his tongue.

And it is. A cold night aswirl with stars and clouds of gloaming colour overhead. Around us sleep the ruins of a farmstead. A cowering corner of mudbrick walls put out a ribcage of rafters above our heads. The roof, though, has long since burnt away, or rotted down to nothing. How many others stand like it in the valleys of Stonefalls? I haven’t been counting — I’d only lose track.

Simra reaches a hand out from his fleece-lined cape and holds it towards the fire. For a moment, his fingertips caress the air. Like beckoning. Like practising one’s letters on a lover’s skin. He breathes a word I can’t quite catch, but I know it for a Calling by the way it asks and our campfire answers, burning higher. No wood or scrub, or grass, or dung — it’s from inside himself that he feeds it, little by little. His magelight dims a little, starving down to a sullen red glow.

“Were you making something?” he asks after a time. “Spell-shaping something?”

I look down at the clay in my hands. The shards have formed into flats like riversmoothed pebbles. Some have begun to open themselves out, parting to form holes through the center. Not pebbles maybe, but coins, as they look in Morrowind.

“No,” I shake my head and close my fist around the clay pieces. “Were you writing? I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to…”

“S’fine,” he says. “I wasn’t. Bad night for that, turns out.”

Still, there must be ink on the page he had open, for he blows it dry with a sigh, then closes it. Moments later, he brings out a clay bottle. Holding it next to his ear, he shakes it. He frowns again and his teeth show, worrying at his bottom lip. He puts the bottle away.

“What were you doing? I mean, really doing.” He leans toward me, hunching deeper over himself. “What is it you’re doing when you get like that? Remembering?”

I reach up, rubbing at my neck. “Trying to remember.”

Simra’s eyes narrow. They are slits aflicker with firelight. “But it’s not just that, is it? There’s magic in it somewhere. I can feel it. Like someone breathing down my neck, but all over me. And you’re over there just…throwing out waves of that.”

Was it the small spell of crafting that he caught a sense for, or my remembering? I’ve never thought of either as any great work of magic. Now I am frowning too, I think.

“An old friend,” I begin. “Someone who was kind to me and taught me. She told me something when I was very young. She said that everyone has a sense for magic. In most who have no way with it themselves, it’s such a small quiet subtle thing they hardly sense that they’re sensing it. But for us, she said – for people who work magic often enough that they live it a little – they sense and they know. Strange though — everyone’s sense is different.”

Tanet always told me that, for her, it was a taste in the back of her throat, a little like copper and nothing like copper. She never could explain, knowing it was something I would never feel for myself. But feeling as I’ve felt now through Nanrahamma, and so many others, I know now as she didn’t, and know that she was wrong. One day I’ll feel as she did too, but I dread when that day might dawn.

“You can feel it?” I ask.

“In my skin,” Simra nods. “And my fingerbones and scalp.” With the fingers of one hand he twists a dark metal ring round and round one knuckle of the other.

“For me it’s a song, I think. Not always nice, but always a kind of music. One of my mothers – a very wise woman – told me that was good for our kind of magic. A gift, as our magic is all sound and song. It would make things easier for me.”

Or else, Nanrahamma said, it would make me lazy. Complacent, lax — shy of doing the hard work any other wisewoman took for granted as part of her role. It showed how hopeless I was – how slow a learner – when so much was handed to me by sheer accident, yet still I failed to excel…

“So when you asked if you were singing, you must’ve thought you might’ve been, right? But I couldn’t hear it… What’s that mean? That sometimes you’re only singing on the inside? Silent?”

“I…don’t know? I’ve not—… I’ve never thought—… It all sounds the same to me. Or, not the same. Every song’s different. Every spell-song or still-song that things sing just by being, but…”

He looks at me like I am something strange. It makes me think that maybe I am, but if I am then he is too, as everyone is to an other. Even so, his eyes stop me.

“And remembering,” he says. “The kind of remembering you do. That’s a kind of magic too? Must be, if you do it through some kind of singing, like you thought you were back then.”

“I don’t know. Maybe. I’m not sure.”

“Did you learn it? Get taught it? Or did you teach yourself? Or have you always done it?”

“I don’t remember. I don’t know. It’s part of a wisewoman’s duty, but maybe it’s different for other ones.” Did Nanrahamma teach me this herself, from when I was too young to know it? Or did she start to teach me because I already remembered this way? She who said she had dreams, visions, sometimes of the future. Her omens and visions had her and my birth-mother lead their clan from Vvardenfell. Her glimpses of the future savedd them all from it. How different is it, then, to see the past as I do? “I don’t know. Everyone bound to a Ghostline is touched by it sometimes.”

“Right. The voices of the past, all awhisper in their heads, talking wisdom, asking favours. All that. I get the concept. I just — I’ve never…” He searches for words. He cracks his knuckles. His fingers knit. “How’s it feel? Most people, they can’t ever remember the past as anyone but who they are in the present, can they? That colours things. You though? You told me once, you remember things as whoever’s remembering them, like you’re them, there, then. Or yourself, living it over. That’s — I just wish—… It’s amazing.”

It’s cloudy, I think. Too much colour. Remembering too much makes it easy to forget things. Lose my place, my voice… I think: I don’t know who I would be if I wasn’t all that I am. A clearer person maybe. But amazing..?

“It’s tiring,” I say. Like his questions are tiring. Like someone picking over a gamefowl for the last scraps of flesh. I’ve seen him do it to a racer I caught us, not wanting to waste even the worst meat. Now it’s me he’s gleaning down to my bones.

“I know. I know. Or — I can imagine.”

But I think: No you don’t. And I think: No you can’t. And for a single night-long moment, I envy him. I envy him his mind at first, and then in time I envy him his whole self. What must it be like to be just one person? I envy him the option to be selfish.

For a time he turns back to his book. I get the sense that he’s writing me down. That I am being recorded. And the feeling is a mixed one: fear and shame and flattery, all together. While he writes I only wait for him to talk again. I know it’s coming before it’s come, but don’t know what he might say.

“Forgetting, though.” He lets it go like a sigh or a cough, with the frustration of something he can’t keep a hold on. “What about that? How does that work?”

I think for before I speak. “The Ghostline doesn’t forget.” But I don’t sound sure. A Ghostline forgets nothing – maybe so – but the ghosts within it? Time wears away at all things, and with time they forget their names…

“Right, right. But what about you?”

“I…” This I had not expected. “Doesn’t everyone?”

“Forget?”

“Yes. Every living person. Don’t they?”

“Right…Suppose so. With time. I suppose they must.”

 

 

_At Omayni we turned our backs on the sea and struck towards the mountains. Hillsides, hillfolk, hillforts. Passes and breakspine paths through the maze of grey and tan stone. Hearthsmoke rises from hidden places among the crags and gullies. Cold and high, we fog the air with our breath’s hot steam._

_There are fewer of us now than there were. Most in the caravan go on foot. Anyone still with a beast to ride leads it by the bridle._

_Columns of stone stand lone and improbable above the tops of the hills and ridges. Shrubbed crags, sheer in one place, tiered the next, and bearded with dry red lichen._

_Katharas looks at the high places with something undecided in his eyes. It flutters between wonder and hunger and pride._

_I think: That is what makes him climb. Not the ask of our leader when she tells her second, ‘It’s too close here. We need farther eyes than we’ve got,’ and her second calls Katharas’ name down the line. He climbs for himself, I think. To prove one thing, and sate another._

_One day comes. The sky is raw linen. The sun is a raw flatness, shining faded through. Dolmesa’s maps have done her no good. We are lost – stopped and resting – and she has sent Katharas climbing, in hope that up there he will find us._

_He takes off his boots, as he always does. Two mer crouch on our water-cart, amongst the huge wicker-armoured jars. Hooting and laughing, they watch him go up. Jeering or admiration — it’s hard for me to tell. By the time he’s coming down again, the show they wanted is over. Only I see as he slips._

_Someone shrieks. Me or him — it’s hard now to tell and perhaps it’s both. But in that moment I feel two scores of eyes turned on me all at once. I clamp the crook of my elbow over my mouth, less to stifle the sound than to hide my face._

_He’s falling but not fallen. He clings with all he has. By scratching, scrabbling, torn clothes and bloodstained stone, he hangs and falls, hangs and falls, a slow and ragged way down._

_I jag through the crowd as it gathers. The pull is like hooks in my skin._

 

 

Walking again, I think of it now as I thought of it later. I think on it maybe the way that he would: as a bargain; a paying of prices. He told me, as we climbed as a caravan in slow-sloping stages towards High Silgrad, that was what he’d done. Buying back his life from out of death’s pocket, at the cost of raw palms, skinned shins and opened knees, his feet in tatters. And though I’ve never had a mind for coins, costs, measures, I understand debt and I understand price. That’s the root of the Sharing, after all. That’s the start of duty.

I think now as I thought of it in the days that followed. That there I paid him back for the night that he saved me from someone taught envy and hatred by cruelty. By not letting him fall by the wayside, unable to walk, as Hlasil had, I paid him back for that night among the carts and wagons.

_On my knees by his side I am singing. A skinsong, a bonesong, twining together. Weeks of flesh reknit onto the ruin he’s made of himself. I cannot Share with him, so I cast from my strength alone. I undo the damage though it husks me nearly dry. But the power I need for the healing alone leaves none left to numb his pain. In his eyes I see part of him hates me for it. Another part, I hope on foolish hope might love me just a little._

At the time, I tell myself, I didn’t know why I went to him, helped him. Only that I must. No debt or duty found space in my mind for how full I was with need. Did I need him healed, unhurting? No. I needed him not to be left behind. I needed to not be alone. All these years and how many friends have I known? All these years…

Still, later he left all the same.

Walking, I think on it til I think: Now you’ve thought too hard. I feel it like the pull towards sleep, folding my mind in on itself, drawing me strong as the tides.

In my mind and my memory I’m almost there again. Bodram. The screams and scent of smoke. But I grit my teeth. I won’t recall. I take the lobe of my ear between thumb and finger and pinch hard like Nanrahamma used to. The pain puts me back in my body, and keeps me in the now…

Grim, I think to myself: He left, yes, but so did so many others, so much sooner. The leader whose name I barely remember. The second whose name I never knew. And those who died. Would it have been kinder if he’d been among them? And those who were taken — how many became like Hlasil? How many—?

“Tammu? Tam, you alright?” Simra’s voice.

I shake my head. There is sweat in my hair. I do it to clear my mind and come back to myself, but then I remember that, to Westerners, a shake of the head means ‘no.’

“D’you need to stop? … You don’t look good … Let’s stop.”

Is this kindness or investment? When the air was ascream with arrows, did he fear for me?

“Why did you come back?” I hear myself say. It’s almost a sob.

“—What?”

I feel ground against my knees. I’ve sunk to them. My eyes are both blind, blurring.

“Can you tell me? Can you just tell me that? Why? Why did you come back when you went away? Ran. Five years. Five years and you come back now. Why?”

“I don’t—… Tammunei, listen to me, I can’t—… Velothis. You’re talking too fast.” But it’s a tongue we’ve talked in together — a tongue he’s troubled to learn. There was a time I used to teach him.

“Liar!” I spit it out, and again in more settled Dunmeris. Rage makes the sounds clipped and careful. Slow. “Liar! You know that word, don’t you? It’s written on you, after all!”

“You—…” It dawns in his voice. “You. Fucking. What?” A cold and sudden knowing. A blazing newgrown fury.

I raise a hand to my good eye and wipe away the wet so I can see his face. It’s twisted, but not by scars. For all the mess of his mouth, the break of his nose, his face has never been ugly to me til now, torn open by a grieving kind of anger.

“Tell me,” he says. “You’ve got something to say? Say it.”

I wanted to hurt him, like not knowing hurt me, all this time since he came back. But now? “I can’t — I don’t — I don’t know — I’m sorry — I’m so sorry — I don’t know…” I never had much fire in me.

“Tell me!” His voice is already hoarse. He’s changed to his mothertongue, as I switched to mine. The Grey Quarter’s crude patois comes rough from the back of his throat. “S’these, right? My face. My Marks. Ones you always said don’t mean a thing?” He spits. “Crowshit! You know! You know and you’ve always known, all this fucking time!”

I’m myself again too late. Pathetic, I see myself and think, even as I grovel and fumble to mend the tear I’ve made. “Please… Please..?”

“And she knew too! She fucking knew all along she must’ve she must..!”

I watch his hands. The violence in them. He scythes and claws at the air. Worse, he touches the marks at his mouth with screaming fingers. The lines that half-echo what marks me as One Who Speaks: an upward curve from the corner of his lips, retinued with circles.

“Gods..!” Simra’s grip goes to his belt. In a wrench of motion his sword’s halfway from its sheathe. “Fuck…” A whimper through gritted teeth. He hisses the blade back into the scabbard. “No no no no no..!”

No more words come after. Just a half-sobbed scream. The air is hot, ashriek with smoke. He’s gone again.

I cave in on myself and remember Bodram, not in words but noise.


	5. Chapter 5

_The soil itself is cinders, sown with bones, overgrown with weeds. Fallen stones that once were walls, bricks, homes, now litter the caved-in streets. Other houses stand whole but empty, left only for the use of ghosts._

_Blood cried out from Bodram before we came. It shall carry on long after we’re gone. It floods the lungs with every breath here, thick as drowning._

_We came hungry, down the river and downland from High Silgrad, perched in the hills. Our carts and wagons limp behind us on broken buckled wheels. A hamlet by the water told us:_

_“Bodram. You’ll find it not far now. Nothing to spare here, seras, but no doubt there’s them in the city’ll trade your stocks full again.”_

_And by the time I feel the wrongness on the air – the savagery set into the stones of this place – it’s too late._

_First comes the near-silent sound of arrows. Shorn air. Then an ululation, singing out high between joy and mourning: their warwail. I’ve heard it in my dreams more often than in waking. Still, something in my blood responds to it, and sets my marrow singing. The oft-eclipsed aspect in my ancestry that, when asked Who are you? will answer: Vereansu._

_A moment of elation, and then I am part of our crowd again, and drowned in new knowledge. A realisation. We have been trapped – tricked – and they fall on us like prey, driven fear-mad to the hunters’ close._

 

 

My eyes try to fix themselves. One finds focus and finds me staring. A corner of the horizon is curtained off with smoke from some distant source. So why do I smell its sharpness now, as near as near as near?

Simra. He’s here and has brought the reek of smoke with him. He wears it like a coarse grey coat, and like wet wool it hangs from him. He wears it like Bodram’s still clinging to him. I blink hard with both eyes and pinch my ear to make sure I’m myself and awake.

“You’re back,” he says. “Good. So am I.”

His voice is hoarse; red and worn as rust. Everything about him seems slack and starved and sleepless. He stands, moves in a desperate lurch to a new spot, stands still. He looks round to stare and then again he looks anywhere else.

He’d be pacing if he had the strength — I know him well enough to know it. But instead he’s spent the last of himself. No ease or energy remains in him. I still have a scrap of both, and together they feel a little like bravery.

“Is this why you do it?” I say. “Leaving, the way that you do. So that when you come back they’ll be so thankful you’re not gone for good that you won’t ever have to say you’re sorry and shouldn’t have gone at all?”

He stops and turns midstride. I’m under his eyes again, fixed under all their low bright fire. I might have flinched once. Now I only wait.

“Might be.” He kisses his teeth and his eyes turn laughing. “Fuck knows why I keep trying though…” The sound he makes after is a difficult one. It’s hard to call it a laugh or a sigh — it tries to be both and gets lost halfway. “Might be why I lie too,” he says. “Tell stories. Use different names. Simrin, Katharas, Lyros, Nimmun. It just…happens. I just do it. Been all kinds of person to all sorts of people just so I’d never have to be myself. Whatever my fake names did, and whatever stories stuck to them, they wouldn’t end up part of who I am for anyone but me. And the only ones that owe anyone anything are dead names I’ve left behind while I’m off and free and starting again.”

“And again. And again… For a mer who heaps so much worth on the things they own, you try very hard to go back to having nothing. No history, no name, no friends.”

He brushes a jut of rock almost-clean and sits down on it, arms hugged round his middle. “I set you right didn’t I? Told you who I was. What d’you make of that?”

“What were you trying to make of it? I’ve always wondered…”

“I was trying to make a friend!” He yelps like I’ve pulled the words from him. Yanked out like hair tugged up at the roots. “I’d lied for months to everyone I’d met since I crossed that fucking border. No-one in Morrowind knew who Simra Hishkari was and no-one gave a shit. And then every time you called me Katharas, it fucked with me, alright? I didn’t want to lie to you anymore.”

“So why did you start again?” I ask. “Not telling the truth can be a kind of lying too, just the same as telling untruths.”

“Tssht.” Simra pushes back. He is trying to smile. Brush me off with sweetness, like taking hair from the limbs with honey. “If failing to speak your mind the whole entirety of always is lying — fine, I’m a liar. But so are you and so’s anyone. Listen. I read something once – story, history, parable, hard to say which – but it said something…resonant, right?”

And after that his talking changes.

“The daedra are the truths we acknowledge to better know ourselves, and our world, and the trials we face just by living in it. That’s how it began, and that’s where we started. Our people woke to that when they achieved their Exodus. And that was the work of Boethiah, it said, Prince of Foment and of Overthrow. Boethiah let the followers of Veloth walk into chaos. Broke them so they might be remade. But on their journey it was Mephala who taught them to remake themselves.”

Rhythm and cadence — by now he is almost chanting.

“When all our people lived by was a scathing storm of truth, the story goes, Black Hands Mephala taught them lies. Among them were the lies that trust’s worth trusting in, and those who lead worth loving. Among them were the lies that help us hide desires, and grow to be more by chastising our lesser selves. The lies of patience and prudence. Society, Veloth’s followers learnt, is a web of lies, but one that ties together as much as it entraps. And by then they had forgotten the people they had been, for they had learnt to turn by truth and lies, and so became Ch—”

“I don’t care!” The sound bolts free of me. His voice turned telltale. His words milled their edges fine – polished their sides smooth – all so that they might be easy to swallow. And all the while the sound of me telling him to stop and see me and tell the truth struggled behind my teeth. “I don’t care, I don’t care!” Free now. “I don’t care what you’ve read. I don’t care about tricks and pretty distractions or puzzles…”

Simra stares at me. His eyes are sharp and flat as glass for a moment. He doesn’t like to be interrupted, but I will not be intimidated. Not by him and not anymore. He sighs a long sharp sound through his nose, then speaks on like I’ve said nothing. His voice is tight:

“Point is, lies show truths too when you look at them right. Listening to me lie taught you an important truth.”

“What?”

“You really need me to tell you? Shit…” He started by trying to smile but now his mouth is pulling downward. It tugs the false Harrowmarks on his face askew as he gestures to them with a restless hand. One Who Lies, they say. “Written on me, ain’t that right? But look at yourself while you’re at it. We’re both liars here, Tam. Didn’t know you even could lie but turns out you’ve been doin’ it this whole time. Either way, I’m the liar you’re stuck with, and the same for you to me, and without each other? Shit, we’d both have to give our plans a good fuckin’ rethink, wouldn’t we? I suggest we get the fuck on.”

He stands. Against the sky and the smoke that streaks it he looks like a broken thing bundle-mended together. A thing made of limbs and little enough else, like the ancestor scarecrows that kept watch on the hillsides near Stregaris. One hand closes over the grip of his sword. The knuckles flex white through the skin.

“Which way now?” he asks, blunt and tired and guarded. “Close, aren’t we?”

“Yes.”

We’re done here. I think it, but with every shift of his face and form he speaks it, loud as laughing.

“It’s Bodram, isn’t it? That’s where you’re taking us. Where she’s holed up.”

I am silent, shrinking, shrivelled round a seed of selfish guilt.

“Went off walking and I know what I saw, so don’t try tell me otherwise or just say nothing. Valley, riverfork, ruin. So tell me — is that where we’re headed?”

“Yes.” Smaller this time.

“How long’ve you known and not told me? Second thought, fuck it, I don’t care. Just proves my point. Come on. Still daylight left to spend.”

I stand too and follow him as he walks across the hillside. I think: How long did I know and not tell myself?

We pass through a swathe of blackened grass. A black stunted tree stands with a red-glowing heart of embers, still breathing threads of smoke. Even the stones are scorch-split, white as cinders where they’re not burnt dark as charcoal.

Simra looks at me over his shoulder. The glance is sly and secret, smug as blistered sugar but scrupled and muddled with something like shame. I think: He did this.

After that, he has eyes only for the valley below, and my eye follows his back. In his white hair, the restive wind. In the folds of his clothes, it comes and goes. Another day perhaps to Bodram.

 

 

_“INSIDE!”_

_A hand closes round my elbow. The pull of it nearly breaks the joint._

_My one good eye rolls in its socket. In a single split moment, it’s seen too much._

_One mer tackles another to the ground, throwing themself on the other, overshadowing them. An instant later, their back bristles with arrowshafts. The child covered and trapped in their arms is one shriek among many._

_A flash of white light. Someone stands on a cart-top, arms wide. In front of them the air is hazed, rippling like water, and full of arrows caught in their flight. My ears ring with the sound of the spell. A whirring whipcrack of sound and the mage sweeps the air in front of them sidewards. The arrows move again, veering off to stick and splinter against a wall._

_In a thunder of feet and a wail of glee, a rider crashes into our caravan’s clamour. We are crammed into the street. Bones break and figures fall under the charging guar’s ramming head and stamping feet. A blade flashes. Blood streaks the air._

_And more and so much more._

_“INSIDE! NOW!”_

_Katharas has me. He pulls me almost off my feet and then I’m running with him._

_We stumble into and past someone. They fall and tangle on the ground. Friend or foe?_

_Katharas drags us off the street. Under a broken arch and into a walled-off thicket of once-garden. We strike a cowering sprint through the shadows of a long porch._

_He’s found a locked door. He curses, makes to kick it, remembers his part-healed feet, and looks at me with a plea in his eyes._

_I step forward and the song I use to twist and slag the iron sounds a little like the screaming at our backs. The bolt on the door smokes and shudders._

_Something clatters from the cracked brickwork beside me as I sing. The warwail sounds again. Something flashes on my blindside — a blur of hot light and a scuffle of feet, panting breath. Flesh strikes flesh. Then a wet and shallow tearing sound. Once, twice…_

_“Go!”_

_Katharas pushes me through the doorway. Follows. Slams it shut behind us as we pour into a narrow stairwell. The touch of his hand stains both of us red._

_He turns to me, wild-eyed. “Up?”_

_“Down!” I hiss._

_A cold blue-green ghostlight comes to life in my cupped palms. I make it light our way downward._

_In the cellar, Katharas’ breathing rasps in my ears and the floor beneath our feet is broken pottery, drifts and dunes of cinder and dirt._

_“Stormtunnels,” I whisper aloud. “They’ll have to have — Ah!”_

_I find the boards and bolt of another door in the darkness. I jolt it. It doesn’t budge. I heave til my arms ache and it springs loose. The door yawns onto a tunnel beyond._

_We hurry aimless together through the channel burrowed under Bodram’s streets. Tight-cramped, we have to go one ahead and one behind, stooping under the low ceiling._

_We pass turnings and splits in the tunnel until another door looms out from the darkness._

_“No bolt on this side. Fuck this, we don’t have time!”_

_Katharas snaps in a language long-lost and familiar — almost Nordic. He moves me aside, plants his feet, and snarls something at the doorway. Flame answers what could only have been a Calling. The wood of the door glows low red, smouldering. He barks another Calling and it flares up furious orange. He lashes out a hand and it falls in on itself and apart, crumbs and embers and sparks spraying into the chamber beyond._

_He draws his sword and steps inside. I watch his shoulders tense as he turns, scouring each corner, then his whole stance falls loose._

_“Safe,” he says._

_This cellar squats under a ruin, I think. Daylight slants through the floorboards above. A trapdoor hangs shut in one corner. And through the gaps the sunlight creeps through, sound carries too. Screaming, warcries, the stench of smoke and blood from the city overhead._

_“It’s still happening,” I say, following him in. “I can hear them. Can’t you? We’re dying.”_

_“No. Not us. Them. We’re not dying here. Not you, not me. We wait.”_

_But I talk us towards the light. It is one of those rare times when purpose overcomes me and makes me calm. I know what to do. But my knowing takes what peace he’s found and casts it, torn, off towards terror._

_“You’re talking crowshit! Madness and suicide. There’s no way…”_

_“I don’t want to leave them.”_

_“There’s no way. No way! You’ll get yourself killed. You’ll get us both killed!”_

_“Is there any other way?”_

_“Yes! Ghosts and bones and godsblood, yes! We stay! We hide! Here!”_

_“Waiting it out? Like a storm? No. I don’t want that. Could you live with yourself? After that? Knowing?”_

_“You don’t know half what I live with.”_

_“I don’t. But are you happy living with it?”_

_“Fucking what?”_

_“I wouldn’t be. I won’t be. They wouldn’t be. I know that. Not the dead, not the living. Do you understand? I know a way, I think. But I’ll need you to guard me, at first.”_

_“I swear, Tammu… I fucking swear…”_

_“Stay or leave. Whatever you want. But I need you to stay.”_

_Frightened. Both of us are frightened. Gnawed by fear like a plague of fleas. When it seemed we’d stay in the cellar, for him perhaps things were simpler. It made him calm. I grew worse. Itched by voices; pricked by the pang of new death after new death, constant as rain above us both._

_He is wild eyed, wide eyed. His expression flickers like fire, from conclusion to question, to question on and on._

_“You’ve saved me once,” I say, gentle as only those who can’t yield can be. “I’d trust you to do it again. Will you?” In my voice it murmurs like magic, like music — a certainty that scares me and leaves me unafraid._

_“Stupid… Stupid… You don’t—… Trust me? You don’t even—”_

_I am losing him. His words are falling to pieces. He look younger now, all but a child._

_“I trust you, Katharas.” I lay a hand on him, hinged open over his shoulder. He flinches once, hard, then stiffens, falls still. “I need you to trust me. Do you? Trust me?”_

_“That’s not my name…”_

 

 

I thought: This place has known too much of death. This land has lost the ones who lived on it and been made to drink their blood. I thought: These people already have known death too well. First their oxen and horses, guars for the pack and the saddle, and then their kin, by choice and by blood. They were made to swallow their tears and walk on, and now this final horror too? I thought: I can’t change the loss or stop the losing, but I won’t let it worsen.

Five years are all that’s passed but I look back on the self that once I was and think I was far too young. Five years only, and already I think I’ve grown older, old. Has wisdom started to find me too? Is hardness, firmness, coldness a kind of wisdom? Too often perhaps, and not often enough.

Simra was younger still. Older now, yes, but still younger than me. But maybe he was the wiser of us when he told me it was too late for Bodram.

“A dead city,” he thinks aloud, walking ahead of me through the valley. “Not a big one, fine, but still a whole city. And all of it gutted or burnt or just fucking empty.”

There’s marvel in his voice. Or else there’s a marvel his heart feels, seeing this place, and he’s talking to tell himself why. Since this morning he’s started speaking again, afraid of the shadow our silence had cast. We pick through the stiff and waist-high grass that grows near this fork of rivers, blue-grey-green in black-grey dirt. He talks on. My shadow is still growing. I trudge along, half-here.

“Fucks with me, if I’m honest. Not the fact that it got that way in the first place. One lean Winter on the plains and the Vereansu ride farther afield, flattest way they can, to find someone whose harvest wasn’t utter shit — least compared with pickings in Deshaan. The kinband survives another year. Nasty, yeah, but it figures, right? Makes sense. I get that. Might not have, once, but… What fucks with me’s that it stayed empty after. Once the Vereansu were done with it.”

“They killed what they couldn’t take or burn,” I hear myself say.

“So did the Red Year up north. So did the Argonians in the South. People rebuilt. Reclaimed what they could. Last I remember, Bodram still had good empty buildings. Broken bits to build with. Good ground to plant in, for all I fucking know.”

“Dead buildings. Dead earth. Wrong in the soul.”

I see his shoulders shudder ahead of me. After, he kisses his teeth. “Reckon this makes sense too then. That a necromancer’d get herself nested up in a place like that. Like this. Not so empty after all.”

I concentrate on the sounds nearby so as not to hear what lies ahead. The long-moaning wind and the flutter of grass. The clatter and jangle of Simra as he moves, all bracelets, beads and necklaces, rings in his untorn ear. The heartbeat of our footsteps, never quite in time.

I concentrate on what is, but things that were sometimes blur in, and I see Simra as someone he’s not.

 

 

_He walks before me. All too well, by days and days, I get to know his walking back. The cast of his shoulders, slumped and rolling, are known to me, and known to me are the rain-matted patchwork of pelts he wears, stitched into one motley with stretched dried gut._

_“Not far now,” he tells me. And his voice is like sinews flexing under skin. “Be in the mountains soon.”_

_His unwashed hair is the colour of straw and it spikes and flicks in the wind._

_“Think about it,” he says. “I’m taking you home, like as not.”_

_He drags me along behind. The manacles blister my wrists. The magic in the iron sucks the magic from me. They make my brain sluggish and my stomach feel wrong. Or is that the plan I keep behind my teeth?_

_He drags me, tugs hard when I lag behind, and I make myself stumble. It’s not difficult. I fall onto my side, next to the tangle of canisroot I saw and stooped for. I writhe like the tumble has hurt me. It puts my mouth near enough. Shoving the ball of chewed alchemy between teeth and cheek for safekeeping, I bite off as much canisroot as I can. It joins the rest._

_As Amarin yanks me upright again, by the rope attached to my wrists, I think how I’ll make myself free of him — hold his life in my hands and choose._

_Soon, says the hate he’s planted in me. Soon._

 

 

It’s not the truth, this overlap of when and where. The ghost-images are easier to disbelieve as they overbleed into what I see. Easier, yes, but not always easy. What’s hard is to comb out the feelings I have: real and fake; remembered and current.

Simra is speaking. Simra, not Amarin. He says something I can’t make out, and turns to look over his shoulder. I fix his face in my mind, assuring myself it’s his.

I squint and tell myself, I do not hate you, just to test the truth of it, in silence on my tongue. I try very hard these days not to hate very many things, places, people, but sometimes the stronger sharpest feelings are the ones most clearly mine. Selfish, stubborn, I cling to them — they’re anchors in all the tide and ebb of ghosts that fill my mind.

Beyond him is the tight scurry and splash of buildings and ruins that make up Bodram, beyond us both but drawing closer with every step we take. We’ve taken enough that it’s near now. For me it’s in clear loud earshot already, and I try not to hear what it says.

Evening darkens the valley. The mountains that line it help the night to fall early. Around us the grasses turn to shadow, and the voice of the river, its fork, and the streams that feed it, all sound like the running of ink. All but deafening.

“Lights,” Simra stops and says. He points ahead and I follow his hand.

In the dark tumble of Bodram, lamps are being lit. Windows show as slits and squares of golden light. They hang close to the ground, in the deeper blacker darkness pooled beneath the first beginnings of starlight, the first gauzy seeming of moons.

“Not so empty after all,” he says. “Just took the night to see.”

“I don’t understand. How can they bear it?”

“What?”

“I can hear it from here.”

“Maybe they’re just not so much for listening as you. Or they healed it. Fixed it? Whoever they are.”

Most of the city still lies dark. Out of the small pocket that’s pricked through with light, a few detach and begin to move. They come closer with time.

“Shit…” Simra mutters. “Looks like we’ll find out soon enough.”

Strangers, I think.

Simra’s mouth is a hard line now and the evening is sliding fast into full night. He whispers into his cupped hands and calls a surly red magelight. With a gesture it wisps into the air overhead. It glows down as we walk on toward the moving lamps, and the dark between grows smaller.

There is wrongness in the air and a buzzing in my ears. I cannot feel my belly but know it’s twisting.

“Simra, I can’t…”

“It’s alright. I’ll talk to them.”

Was it always so difficult? Or is it only this place? This time?

“Who goes?”

To us they are figures now, wrapped up in the glow and dancing shadows of fire. To them, we are figures too, bathed in steady spell-light. Simra’s hand goes to the grip of his sword as he calls back:

“Two travellers.” He takes a step forward. “I’ve got a sword but I’d sooner keep it sheathed. My friend here’s unarmed. Neither of us means any harm to you or anyone else in Bodram.”

Liar, I think.

“What cause d’you have to be in Bodram?”

“We’re searching for a friend. Once we find her we’ll be back on our way.”

“Your friend…” They are drawing closer too. A different voice speaks, but their accent and tongue are shared. Mountain people; a flinty hillfolk edge in their speech. “She Vereansu like you? You’ll not find her here.”

Simra hisses under his breath before speaking back. “What makes you so sure we’re Vereansu?”

“You’re ashlanders, I’m sure of that. Marked as much.” A murmur of laughter from many mouths. “Two gravenfaces come in by night, here so near from the plains? Who’s t’assume you’re not skullshapers after that?”

“Assumption…” Simra snaps it, close and quiet like a curse, then carries on loud once more. “We’re on foot, not a bow between us, and coming in from the north. You want more proof than that, you can check my skull yourself!”

We’re close enough to see them now, and they to see us too. My one good eye made nightblind, I can make out little enough – the tapering cones of helmet-crests; a lantern-staff and pair of torches – but Simra has noticed something. It’s taut in his voice, making each word sound like a boast or a threat.

He strides out, over shorn-down stems of barley, fallow after the harvest that must have been and gone. “How long’s House Sadras held Bodram?” he asks.

A bearded mer and a lantern-bearer go out to meet him. “To look at you, I’d say since you were in swaddling clothes.”

“Bout as long as Sadras has been a House at all then, hm? Great or otherwise. What about recently? How long’ve you had it back for? Y’know, after you let the Vereansu borrow it a while? Gotta say, they didn’t keep it in the best nick, did they?”

“Careful, stranger. I don’t know who you think you are—”

“Simra Hishkari. Simra Seven-Fingers to you.” He raises his bandaged hand and flutters the five fingers on it. I feel myself frown. “Heard of me? No? Ask round, you might hear a story or two. Now — d’you mind?”

The soldier growls. Most of the sound is tiredness. “To your posts,” he barks. “Fall back in.” In a muddle of motion and bobbing lights, his company turns toward the city again and starts to march.

Simra looks back at me. He beckons.

I try to step forward. For a moment I press through a wall of noise. It scrapes me naked, sees and exposes me. Then only the nightsounds remain. The air is purged and ordinary.

“It’ll be alright,” he says again. “Trust me. A real bath. A real bed. It might even help…”

I walk towards him and say, “It might.” But the sounds are cold and heavy.


	6. Chapter 6

_A retinue of racers follows my father, both plumed and leatherwinged, crying. We follow them on foot, a procession slashed across the plain’s coarse face. Those who can wear white for mourning. Our knives are ready to grieve him._

_No bier for him. Living yet, he rides as a khan ought to. The clan does not know that he needed his children’s help in dressing. War-prize silks from the settled folk; leather supple as whispers; gut and shoulders armoured in shell so dark it drinks the daylight and resin so sharply bright it cuts one colour into many._

_He rides with his bow and two dozen arrows with heads of good outland iron. He sits his guar where we have strapped him. Still he hunches over the saddle-bow and with every slow-going step I fear that he will fall._

_Myself and my two brothers — we keep silence for his sakes, and so the clan will follow suit. The wise-ones say that noise is for glory and gladness, and will tear a ghost in pieces by making it want to linger in life. But my father’s yet living, even knowing he will die, and I wish he would stay._

_The time comes. My father reaches the circle of bones and rot-blackened grass. He dismounts. Leaning on the neck of his guar for his legs are stiff and weak now, he doesn’t look like our khan any longer — not for all the finery he wears. Only an old man, fighting to stand._

_I fight the urge to break my silence. Perhaps we all do._

_He leans against the guar’s thick neck. He brings out a blade. The beast’s face is full of sweet trust, even as the knife goes in. When her throat is cut and her legs buckle, my father’s give way too._

_He lies, waiting for the racers and the nix and the beasts of the plains. The racers do not leave him waiting long._

 

 

The same dilation and cramp of knowing. I wake to a world unaware what it is. I fluctuate and am stretched, compressed and uncoupled. Like passing a door by fitting through its keyhole, I’m dismantled, remantled, and on the other side.

In the dark of my sleep I was Nirumal: one of three men who was not my father; second of the two khans my mother made and married. Strange, I think, and blame the Vereansu blood that beats beneath the ground here — like my dreaming selves can scent it, drink it up, taste it in their trading and talking.

But in the dark of the room I wake in, I am Tammunei Ereshkigal again. I mouth that truth to myself, trying to make it truer. Soundless, yes, but sure all the same. Here, the numb straits and difficult bends of my body again. Here, the softness and stiffness: the hips I sometimes hate; the rigid shows of growing age at my brow and cheeks as the bones glance through. I trace them in the darkness while my eye still cannot see.

And I wait til morning. Awake now and not dead-tired enough to fall heavy and inevitable back into sleep, I’m kept up by the sounds of the city.

Close by, the quarter the Sadras have reclaimed. Palisades and changing guards and the coarse-ground burr of their highland accents. The song of the pre-dawn cook in our cornerclub, dredging flour through their hands and through itself, grain by grain, less fine than dust, less coarse than sand, and singing with a thousand small touches. The cook sings a song of their own, under their breath, while stoking the fires that will steam the morning’s bread. A song of a dowry, seven gifts, an eighth accepted, a competition between slingers…

Further afield, the silent city sounds out its emptiness. And it’s the silence – vast and passive, wanting no piece of me – that keeps me awake. From under some body of black water in my brain comes the thought: I deserve no peace here. Somehow the fact that I’m afforded any is troubling to me.

But time passes. Morning comes, long and late over Bodram.

This is the only cornerclub still standing here. A dug-out, deep and long and narrow. One wall is also its roof, cant-slanted into the other upright wall. The slant looks east. Dawnlight falls broad through its line of slit windows. Hazing through panes of thin hide, scraped and stretched til lucid and waxed against the weather, the glow that comes through is leeched dim but warm.

We sit at two corners of a square eating-mat. Simra’s hands are systematic, ravenous, breaking his fast. The rest of him is lifeless and muted — drab face and cold slow eyes. He pours yet another cup of tea, drinks it in one long draught, and slips a length of braised stemcraw into his mouth.

“Where did you go last night?” I ask him. He only came back with the dawn.

I hear his teeth. His fingers twitch in sauce-stained discomfort. Quick and fastidious, he licks them clean. “Here at first.” His voice is hoarse. “Then out.”

I look at the share of steamed millet buns, taste one, and find them cloudy-soft, as muffled as the song I heard in the night as they cooked. I wait.

“Reckoned I might find someone who knew me. Turned out I was right. We drank. I asked questions.” His shoulders shudder and his face clenches, folding to hide a grimace, stifle a groan. He carries on with fingers pressed against his closed eyes. “That was the idea. Anyway…found out some things you’ll want to hear.”

I watch. He plucks up a bun, tears it almost in two, and fills it with a sweet and acrid yellow sauce. His mouth is wide and impossible a moment. The bun disappears.

“About..?” I begin.

He swallows, hard. “Yeah. All this. Her.”

“Thank you. For doing that. For helping.”

“Can’t say here though. Not now. We need to go for a walk.” He pours another cup of tea; rubs his eyelids hard. “So much for real fucking beds…”

 

 

_I have never seen him fight before. He has only been a muffled struggle at my back, protecting me, til now. But in the open, stealing through the streets, he goes before me. I am made to watch._

_Death holds no horror for me. So I’ve been telling myself, all but all of my life so far. But death and killing are different things, making different waves, touching the world in different ways. Death and violence need not be connected but he has no care for the distance between them. Desperate energy; a shaking vigour, foundried out of fear. While he fights, all of him’s eaten up with killing. And he has no care for if death comes quick and clean in his wake._

_I step over a corpse he’s made, and feel it’s not yet a corpse. Half the dying Vereansu’s body is flayed by hot air, scoured and tanned by a wave of burning grit. His clothes are unravelling, turning to smoke. Kreshweave coat and cape of netch-leather, stitched with scraps of silk, all in ruins or soon to be ruined. Shoulder and neck broken apart, cloven into a messy divide and on toward the ribs. Brow split in two. Two strikes of a blade did that — the one whose edge I’ve watched him hone._

_We leave the dying mer behind but I hear his heartbeat in my head. Its stagger and limp is a cry for help that will not come._

_“Carry on?”_

_“Yes,” I answer. “Not far now.”_

_I look at him. Red hands, stiff drained face; fine jacket and smeared sword. He is panting. I’ve known his new name so short a time that this is all I have to know it by. Simra._

_We break from the mouth of the alley that hid us, into the open street. Then another, til Simra’s sword-edge is chipped and jagged as teeth, its grip too wet now to hold. Then another, til he is pale and bloodless, staggering. It hurts not to help him, as much as it hurts to follow on, in horror of him. But I must save my strength, sure of what’s to come._

 

 

“Can you still feel it?”

“Hear it, you mean?”

“Yeah. Like yesterday. The thing you heard. Asked if I could hear. That. Can you?”

“I stopped hearing it last night. All the city went silent.”

“You mean the dead just…stopped? When?”

“When we came close. After the mer with the spears and helmets. When we started walking in.”

We walk out again now, away from the way that we came. A river runs on our right. We strike out against its stream, surrounded by its noise. The air is cold and hard.

“Is that strange?” Simra asks. He is chewing pink slivers of guljana root and the alchemy in them has whipped him from tired and muted to manic. “Does that ever happen normally? Naturally?”

“Naturally? No. A shadow of death. A place’s lingering ghosts. They wouldn’t. Not like that.”

I am frowning, still uneasy with this place’s vacant quiet and absent ghosts. Last night I bathed and at first my hair felt soft, thick, clean, in ways I’d almost forgot. Now it feels heavy, as if wet, foreign and wrong on the skin of my neck.

“Wouldn’t what? Cooperate?” Simra struggles, trying to grasp in his mind a sense he’s never had. A blind mer, trying to imagine blue, white, green…

“Flock, yes. Like a swarm or shoal.”

“Then why has it? I don’t know! I’m not the fucking expert. Far as my expertise goes we’re way the fuck off here. So — storming up one moment and silent the next. Why?”

“A Ghostline might do it. A Ghostline can think to, choose to, or be made to—”

“Fuck. Fuck fuck fuck, fucking shit, alright. Tammu?” He turns and looks me over, sharp, reckoning me out. “That’s not — This isn’t —… Here, all this, that whole…shadow, you said? That’d just be ghosts, right? Should just be ghosts and death and lingering-fucking-weirdness, right? Chaos. But it’s not. It’s…it’s…concerted, right?” He runs a hand hard through his lopsided hair, pushing it back from his face. “How do Ghostlines start?”

He steps towards me. An arm flashes out, almost taking hold of me at the shoulder, then falls. Both his arms fold round his body. He holds himself instead.

“I…” Shaking my head, I close my eyes tight. I cast a net out into my memory. It comes back empty. “I don’t know. They’re old. All of them. I don’t know if they’re made, or…”

“Right. Right. I don’t know why, I don’t know how, but…someone’s done something. She’s done something. She’s here and done something. Made one. From…odds and ends of what was left behind, I s’pose. And now..?”

“How?” My brow knits. My back teeth ache. “How do they allow it? Not feel it? The settled mer — why have they not stopped her? Forced her out? Killed her?”

“The Sadras? That’s what I found out. That’s what I needed to tell you. They asked her here. They wanted their city back but couldn’t have it. Cursed, they thought. The dead were…loud. She turns up – a traveller; a priest, she said – and says she can help. All she needs is to be let alone. A scrap of luck in shit times, they think. They let her through. So she walks into the dead city. Three days pass, and after that? Quiet. They start to rebuild.”

The wrongness rises again, but no longer from outside of me. The disgust is mine — revulsion physical as a flux, cramping inside me.

“I’m sorry.” Simra’s voice, swimming against the rush in my ears. “I’m sorry. Here…Here…”

I feel a touch against me. My back, rubbing, uncertain; the rear of my skull, steady. I shrink away from it. I fall away.

 

 

_It’s not a temple or a shrine but suffering has made a shrine of it; has made a temple of it; has made a shrine and buried it. It’s only a square, a shared courtyard. The caved-in faces of three collapsed houses, shopfronts perhaps — it’s hard to tell now what things were, under the soot and black-scorched stone. This place is not for knowing by eye._

_A well stands dry and blocked in the center. A throat that cannot swallow for all that fills its gullet. I see it by looking back: stripped bodies, bloody, wounds widened with knives where the killers took back their arrowheads, and threw the corpses down…_

_“Here?”_

_“Yes.”_

_The buildings are open-mouthed and shouting. For all the noise that death is making I no longer hear the live world around me. The overcast sun on my face, standing in the smoke-stained breeze aboveground. Still I start to descend. Not my body, by hand and foot, I send down my senses, my self._

_My hands do the work. An outpour of oils from the flask in my sash and now the air is heady with perfume, heady as strong sujamma. Fingertouch between my brows and fingertouch dabbing below each ear til the scented oil runs down my neck. I make myself sacred. I lie, long and flat against the cracked paving stones. The clamour grows worse._

_have you come here you have come see she sees me hears me hears ME no eyes not for you please listen ME let me crawl let ME climb foot against faces i tried to see the sun PLEASE it’s dark my limbs are trapped in limbs are trapped by limbs they hold me BACK hold me DOWN me PLEASE_

_I hear you. Do you hear me?_

_hear ME he’s here for ME please hurry up my grip is forgetting who is who am i don’t go who are you my bones there is something an itch a stitch in my ribs it’s sticking PLEASE a healer are you her please it hurts_

_I am One Who Listens. I am One Who Speaks._

_a SAVAGE a scarface like them they’re like them a TRICK false light for our longing no LISTEN my hope my hopes can hear the sun_

_Listen to me. They are here. The ones who threw you down._

_LET ME one moment in the sun the clean air on my tongue LET ME OUT up and under the sky I WILL REND I WILL BREAK A SHATTER OF BLOOD A SPRAY OF BONE MY TONGUE SO LONG DRY SO LONG MY BROKEN TEETH WILL BREAK YOU break them TASTE THEM please_

_Listen. Silence. Share it. I can help you._

_HELP ME help ME stop ME let it STOP don’t let them STOP ME help_

_Do you want to learn how? I can teach you. I will teach you to climb. I will teach the sun to see you._

 

 

My sight is spanned with slats of blackness. I blink, wake, gather sense to myself, and find that they are rafters. Burnt dark, they spread across the sky then stop, reaching like the wingbones of a great bird. Colours blaze between them: a flushed pink flatness, ocean-deep and ocean-wide; crests and frills of burnished orange, somber brass clouds, moving slow as a murmur. The sun has begun to set.

Beneath the rafters, my back is to a wall. I’m hemmed and hugged to myself, bundled into a corner.

Familiar, I think. These are the sand-brown walls of Bodram, shadowed with smoke, capsized and empty. He must have taken me here, into the city’s emptiness where the Sadras rebuilding has yet to spread.

Tired eyed, I blink. Each opening brings a blurred new picture.

Our baggage is heaped together here. Simra’s satchel; the strapped sack he slings across his other shoulder; the smaller wax-skinned book-bag he carries. My sling-sack; the long fold of frame-bones and supple cured skins that make up my yurt, whispering with the spells I spoke to it. His shape sits on the edge of my seeing, watching the darkening distance.

There was a month we lived like this, after leaving Bodram for the first time. It makes this familiar too. His things and mine together. Nightfall after dawnrise after fall of night, like as the last. Travelling, he and me and the others.

 

 

_PLEASE_

_Good. One voice. That’s good. Share in silence and share in speech. Good. What do you want? Do you want to rise? To see the sun and taste the sky?_

_PLEASE_

_Good. Let that braid you. Raise you. Climb. Reach. I will teach you. When I reach, you will climb._

_WE_

_Good._

_WE CANNOT._

_Good. Through me. Do you feel that? Bone and muscle. Sinew and blood. Together. Be as they are. Feel that? Through me._

_WE FEEL HOW YET HOW LONG HOW LONG WE HAVE KNOWN NOTHING BUT EACH OTHER NOTHING BUT DIRT BUT DARKNESS BUT DIRT WE HAVE BECOME_

_See? Good. You know each other. I reach. Reach up. I’m reaching down. Good. You know yourself. Good._

_TOGETHER_

_Good._

_REMEMBER_

_Yes._

_HOW WARM THE WORLD IS SO WARM THE WORLD_

_Through me. A door. A ladder. See? Climb. I’m open. The door awaits._

_HOLD US YOU CANNOT HOLD US WE ARE TOO MANY_

_No, you are one. And no I cannot contain you alone. But you remember bones and I have taught you muscle. I taught you to climb. Now walk._

 

 

“Simra!?”

The sound chokes out. A stifled scream as I start, forced back into my own flesh.

“Sim?”

He jolts. “What?” It’s a bark; a snapping syllable, breaking against me. Of a sudden I feel his attention on me, both eyes gripping into my skin.

Hazy-eyed, I see him, washed and bathed in red. Not blood — I force myself to know it. Not new-named Simra, scarce known, just shed of being Katharas. Simra five years on. Not Bodram then but now. I close my eyes and speak again.

“I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to wake…”

The fact that I can speak at all shows where I am and when we are. No dream. I reason it through. Now is now is now, and I am not alone.

“No harm done.” Simra sighs; a ragged noise, messy with remorse. “Wasn’t sleeping.”

“Please — where are we?”

A silence. Simra’s frown is masklike, deep and strange in the dark and glow of his magelight. “D’you not—? Shit… Course not. You’ve been dreaming. All this time? Fuck.”

“I’m sorry,” I say again.

“We spoke…” he mutters. “You kept saying. Telling us where to go. ‘Away. Down. Can’t let her hear.’ …Was that still you?”

“I don’t know. I think so. I’ve only been me…” My brow furrows at the taste of the words as soon as I speak them. Strange that my memories have only been my own.

“Hm.”

“Where…where are we?”

“You tell me, you fuckin’ sleepwalked us here! Shit…” He pauses after the sudden snap of his words. There is strange worry in the way that he looks at me. Muddled pity. “Stormtunnels I reckon,” he answers when ready. “Under the city. Seemed like where you wanted us…”

There’s uncertainty in his voice now — a flicker of fear. While I was leading, he didn’t question. While I was dreaming, he didn’t doubt.

I feel around us. Earthen darkness, earthen closeness, walls and hunchback walkways. Familiar. “You’re right,” I nod.

“Then you know where to? From here, I mean? You still know the way even though you’re awake?”

“I think so.”

“Good…” There is sweat on his brow now, and pain half-hid in the hollows of his cheeks. “Thank fuck…” His breathing comes as a shudder of sound, jagged in the dark close air.

“Are you hurt?” I ask. “Is something the matter”

He shakes his head, fast and emphatic. “Just tired,” he mutters. “The night we arrived, the tea, the guljana. Then you, sort of outside yourself. Or too much inside yourself. Whatever. But someone needed to keep watch, specially down here, and I had more rustyhand — creeproot — guljana — I thought…”

“How long now?”

“S’nothing I’ve not done before,” he snips back at me.

“How long?”

“…Four nights? Going on five? Hard to tell down here.” His voice cracks. “You said — dreaming, sleepwalking — you said there wasn’t time. Then you just stopped. Sat with your eyes closed. Knelt. I had to watch. Couldn’t both be sleeping down here. The shadows did things. Then you’d wake up, walk, and I’d follow…”

“Like before,” I say, remembering the journey from Bodram, the days by the river, til the waters broke in channels, splayed off, and Old Ebonheart showed like a rash on the horizon.

“Like you just knew again. You just knew. Like before.” No tears on his face but they sound in his voice now. A dry and wretched sob. “Stupid. All over again. Didn’t think to question. Stupid…”

His features crease. His head falls forward, falls back. A dull thud, not quite a crack, the back of his skull strikes against the wall once.

“Stupid!”

A second time, too quick to stop. By the third, I’m fast enough, hissing, hand against the back of his head, both arms tight against him.

“No. No no no.”

“No, please — please — don’t you—! Don’t you fucking..!”

He struggles. My limbs strive against his. He’s stronger; breaks free; stops limp into my arms, touched and touching. His shoulders heave, tremble, and in time go still.

“Shhh… Shhh…” I coo.

“I’m sorry. Least I’m not now. Not this time.”

At every breath, the scent of his hair. Rain and nameless spice; six kinds of smoke both sweet and biting…

“Hush. Hush now. At least you’re not what?”

“Leaving. Left.”

I think: Not yet. And then push the doubt away. I let myself trust, holding him as he slips into silence. Holding on to a gnarled knot-fleshed scar inside me, and knowing it by its shape. Hope. Hope against hope, against memory and wisdom. As his breathing turns even, into sleep heavy as deep salt water. Hope.

 

 

_After Bodram we follow the river. Day by day we ford it. Ankle-deep here, then deep over our shoes and boots, our knees, then past our waists. They shiver worse each time. The season grows colder._

_Who we are has changed. Our number and makeup. Before it was only motion. Now we share purpose, clear and tidal, rushing along the weak, feeding the strength of the strong. Pilgrimage._

_All pilgrims now. The remnants of the caravan; the ones who did not run and who think I saved them. A handful of Vereansu even, seized by visions, drawn and sworn to the journey. They cut their faces for those they lost. They cut their palms; showed me the blood. An oath, they said_

_I nodded. Because I know, for the Vereansu, to travel together is to be bound as kin. I nodded. Because I know that it’s fear and resentment, as much as respect, that earnt this bond. I broke their band apart. I killed their brothers and sisters. Pulled them from their guars, split their bows, ripped their bellies and tore their limbs out from their roots. With hands that were not my own, yes – cold driven hands – but hands I set in motion. I nod, because for all I did at Bodram, it’s all that I can do._

_To them I am a beacon. Some strange and wandering star, walking the ground, shining by daylight. They think I’m leading them to new lands, new glory, to overwrite their defeat. And I think perhaps I am._

_To the survivors of the caravan I am like an idol to carry, or an instrument. A dowsing rod or lodenstone. The only one left who knows the way. Direction and protection, for those with things left to lose. For those without, I am all that remains._

_But I cannot help except by walking. I watch in silence as agues and fevers spread from the cold weather, cold water, distant winds of ash. I cannot sing well the ones who fall ill. I cannot even speak._

_I am only sight after Bodram. No sound, no speech, no feeling. The cold water fordings numb only my numbness. I stare blank at a shard of dark-green glass that has pierced my foot. I do not hear Simra as he speaks to me, easing it out, salving the cut._

_I am only a gait, a pace, a direction, and a dim figure the others follow. Simra stays by my side, reads my unspoken words and relays to the others. I learn to read his scar-curled lips._

_This is the doing of what I did at Bodram. Deafened by the din I heard. Made mute by the song that took my tongue but left it stiff, intact and awkward in my animal mouth._

_Simra asks me, What did you do? Is it that you can’t speak, or won’t?_

_Frustration twitches across his face. It deepens as he sees I can’t explain._

_The answer’s as simple as it is complex. I overreached myself, leagues worse than ever before. I saw a price to be paid, and paid it, and thought the prize was worth it. But if I was wrong? If what I did was wrong, then these followers are my curse as much as my mute deaf senselessness. The chain of mer that tails after me now — the burden I drag north in my wake._

_I had asked ghosts from the shadows, summoning them out of silence to speak with me. I had rested sleeping ghosts and banished ones born of cruelty to a void that would be kinder than any lingering. Those things are duties and gifts, part of me as much as the eyes in my head, the nails on my fingers. But what I did in Bodram was a new strange sin. I knit the disparate dead as one and told them: Find flesh and dress your voice in deeds. Rise and walk._

 

 

It’s a path my mind flees down, truth-chased, whipped and whipped. It’s a path I find I know how to tread far better than I should. My fingers were always clumsy, my braids messy, hanks of blood-hued hair fraying out from the twists and turns I tried to make. And yet my mind and voice and magic do it deft and practised. Well taught.

Like ropemaking. Strands with strands become a strain, you see? Stronger together but so fragile apart that wind or time or forgetting can all just snap one like it never once was. Do you see, Tammu? Then the strains lap and overlap… No, not with your hands. Ask them together. Knot by knot, plait by plait. A rope. A line.

In the dark the truth is blinding. Saying nothing is also a kind of lie. For so long, by saying nothing, my memory lied to itself.

Every moment that passes in silence feels like a growing stretch of that lie, strengthening it. Strain by strand, braiding length and strength into the rope of it.

I want to wake Simra. I won’t. Instead, in the blackness, I speak it inside myself, so it doesn’t go unsaid:

I did this. This Ghostline did not grow. I made it, braided it. Used it and left it. But Ghostlines are things made to last.


	7. Chapter 7

It dawns slow as a Winter day, a crawling, yawning thing. And it comes over me not as some new knowledge, but as the slow flowing in of something old. I know what’s going to happen, but don’t yet know what it is. What I feel is this: I am deep within the grasp of something, and have been for some time.

I don’t tell Simra. I don’t know that I could explain if I did. And I think he already thinks I’m mad – half-mad at least – and talking to him about this would wax the crescent moon of my madness full.

But it makes it easier to carry on. He thinks perhaps I’ve pulled myself together. In truth I’ve only given myself up to something, and it pulls me forward, and onward, with all the slow force and weight of a rising tide.

I wonder if this kind of knowing is how it started for Nanrahamma, when she started seeing forward in time as well as sideways and a little backwards like the rest of us. I ask myself if it’s my inheritance from her. Or perhaps her working through me, now she’s gone to join our Ghostline.

But I can’t feel my ancestors here. Only the low idiot hum of the Ghostline that I made, years ago. Only my own past, and the ghosts of who I’ve been. Former selves; skins upon shed skins. I think: We all become our present selves by flaying off the past. All but Simra, who it clings to, grain-deep, bone-deep — memory stored in his marrow.

My thoughts come strange. I don’t tell Simra. I don’t know that I could explain if I did.

Walking, we come to a kind of shrine. It’s set into an alcove, off from the tunnel’s main run, crowded with earthenware jars; cramped with kreshweave sacks.

“A place to pray,” I say to him and me, and myself and the stone. “To ask for an end to the storm that’s trapped you down here.”

Simra makes a close-mouthed sound. It means he is taking note; taking interest. “Think we ought to? While we’re here?”

“No…” I decide after a moment. “Dunmer of the Houses speak to the gods too lightly. This shrine is to them. Our eldest ancestors…”

It’s a hole carved out from the brick and daub wall, three-sided, and with fetishes to each of the three Good Daedra hanging from braided threads within. Its faces are stained with ages of smoke. Its bottom is littered with bowls — for the burning of incense, or the leaving of other things? I wonder if this is, in its way, a shrine to her now. The Sadras must leave her food — offerings of one kind or another, besides silence and solitude.

“I was only joking, I think.”

“Oh.”

“Besides, it’s a different kind of storm we’re weathering, right? Down here. It’s different reasons that’ve put us in the dark.” Simra doesn’t speak with malice, only unease. “Just wish we didn’t have to be. I’d take daylight or nightdark over this any time. Least with sun or stars I’d have some magicka flowing back for what I let go...”

I think: His magic is stored up inside him like oil, ready to burn, but gone when it’s gone. I have taught mine to be a slow-flowing spring, even away from the lights of the sky.

He let his magelight blink out hours ago, thinking to save what shreds of power he has left. Now we’re bathed in nothing but the colours of mine — bright moonlight seen through ocean water. It takes the edge from his features. He seems softer, shy, and tired.

We carry on, washed in green and stained with blue.

Silence reigns for a long-walking while.

“I didn’t think it’d be like this.” When Simra speaks again, it’s careful, turned and turned like clay at the potter’s wheel. He has been considering it as we walked on together, in dark and in silence.

I ask him: “What did you think it would be like?”

“Different. More…lined up with me.” One hand slips down to fidget at the hilt of his sword and he thumbs free a fingerswidth of blade. “Find your punarigash. Stop her. And whatever shamblers she’s got bound to her — stop them from stopping you stopping her.”

“You expected swordwork then? Simple work?”

“I expected to feel useful,” he mutters. “I’m no good here. Not to you.”

He is stooped by the slouched low ceiling. He squints into the black, giving out his attention into it and always dreading expectant that it will give something back. I am small, built well for these stormtunnels, and need not hunch as he does. I am well-used to the failings of sight and long ago learnt not to lean on it.

“Is that how you’ve lived then? Five years?” I say. “The work you’ve done? These use you’ve seen?”

“Not entirely. There’s more than one string to my harp. Just…I noticed plucking on one drew better crowds, paid better coin.” He lets go a dry sniff of laughter. “More applause…”

It’s a strained strange idiom, not native to the tongue we speak, but once I comb it out I am not surprised by its meaning. The way he sees himself, he is good for nothing else. Seeing him otherwise falls to me, and others perhaps… I wonder if there are others. What friends has he had these past five years? Has he been loved? Or has he been as I have? Two feet in the dust; one line of steps; the wind blowing them clean before any can follow or find where they lead.

“You’ve been a killer then?”

“D’you ever stop being one once you’ve started?”

“Please…” I know his deflections and know to deflect them.

“Fuck…” He sighs. “How’ve we not had this conversation before now? Do we really have to? Here?”

I consider keeping quiet. But no — need is need. “It helps,” I say. “It’s good to have one voice to listen to. Otherwise my senses search for others. I get strained thin.”

“Fuck…” he says again. “I’ve been a sellsword, yes. There were times I was something else. Set myself up as a scrivener once or twice, believe it or not, writing for people who couldn’t. Letters, contracts, deeds. Things people wanted copied any number of times. That was early days — good practice back when my Dunmeris was still a mess. But other than that? Hiring out as a show of force, bounty work… Short-term soldiering if I had to but…fuck it, I’d sooner scull pots.” He pauses. “There were fucking…extenuating circumstances, right? I needed the money quick. It paid. Now — right or left?”

We come to a fork. An unlit lantern is bracketed to the wall ahead. Simra knows by now to be quiet as I choose. I reach out, feeling our way ahead in the dark. The thread has grown stronger. A texture of sound that spools and draws — a beckoning building certainty. I walk right and he follows.

“Way I see it and from what I know – and sure that’s rumours and half-truths, half-talk – what your life’s made of’s not much different. Not on the face of it. Some outpost has problems with a living breathing bleeding fucker, they band together, save up, pay me to put out their problem. Same lot have problems with something dead? They hope you’ll hear eventually, and you do, and they – what? – have you over for dinner? Leave you milk and honey in a dish to lap up by moonlight? Tsscht. Difference is that I know my price and take it in coin. You? You take what you’re given.”

“It’s not so simple,” I say. Duty has no price. The gifts are part of the path, but the path is a purpose is a prize in itself, for hearing the dead and being heard by them is a trackless land to be lost in…

“Clearly,” Simra kisses his teeth. “This job though… I get the feeling it’s muddier than most. If it was simple…” He tails off.

I glance at his face, sidelong, side-on. He goes on my left. I see the ragged tear through the lobe of his right ear; the broken bridge of his nose. His eyes turn tired towards me. I wither my gaze away. He has slept a little since his stint in bringing us here, but that debt is far from paid in full. Still, I think: It’s enough. Still, I think: It’s time.

And I try to explain, to myself as much as to him. I say in broken terms that we’re here as much to undo my sin as to stop the sacrilege of another. He makes me start from the beginning. And I realise there is none. I don’t remember where I first picked up this trail and started to follow. Startless, ceaseless, and no end in sight.

 

 

_“Remember,” she says. “Remember why we came here. It was never for the weather, was it? Nor the food, nor the sweet voices of bleating milk-skins. Was it? D’you remember why, Tam?”_

_I look into her face. Her age has never been a certain thing. Not like Tanet and Nanrahamma — she wears it on the inside._

_She places a hand on my shoulder and shuffles on her knees to my side. “It was so we could remember, freely, who we are. Know who we are and keep being it.” With deft hands she begins to braid my hair._

_“Nan and Tan say I don’t know yet. That I need to learn or else I’ll stay being nothing.”_

_“Nanra and Tan are too old to know otherwise. They can’t remember what it’s like to be young and not-sure and waiting to be certain.” Her voice is a humming lullaby, when she speaks and when she’s speechless. Now it sounds like sharing secrets. “You were born who you are, Tam. It’s always been in you.” She touches a finger to my chest, my brow. “It’s forgetting that’s the problem. You need to learn not to forget.”_

 

 

“You spent weeks stuck staring at my face after that. After Bodram. Shit luck on your part,” Simra rubs his fingertips against the corner of his mouth. Jaw loose, it stretches the flesh of his cheek hollow and his scars show silver as starlight. “But did you once in all that while see me bat a lash over what you did?”

I shake my head. No. He stayed. I remember his face. The first time I saw it after Bodram lay behind us, his features were puzzled into something like amazement — adoration born from awe. Now he wears soft disbelief where they hung before. But no judgement.

“What did I know?” he continues. “Not enough to have qualms to hold against you. I knew what I saw, and knew fuck-all else.”

I make a small noise in the back of my mouth. An objection that wasn’t quite born before it became a whimper.

“You saved dozens of lives and only used what was already lost.” He says it so firm it’s almost a growl. His hands twitch, flutter, clench, then fan out. “Imagine a shipwreck. A ship founders up on an island. Those that don’t drown are stranded, nothing but black rocks and broken ship and washed up bodies to live by. And they know they’ll die. Starve. Or, fuck it, there’s sea all around and if there’s no rain then thirst’ll get them long before. Now imagine someone takes all the loss and the wreckage and turns it into hope. They build a raft from the broken bits of ship. Who in their right mind would tell them, ‘No, better we all die than live with that disrespect’? Say they use the corpse-gas bloated bodies for fucking flotation! Who gives a fuck? Not the survivors. Not the ones it saved!”

But they followed me. They followed as I walked with the run of the river. As they froze and coughed and carried on. And Old Ebonheart grew from the distance and crowded closer. Delta, mainland and island, then island, then island, spilt beads on a broken string. The landbridge over Scathing Bay, where the water boiled and the winds blew hard, and the voices of the dead rose and scalded me like steam…

“But I failed them,” I say. “In the end I failed them.”

“But first you saved them,” Simra hisses. “First you let them live.”

But who They are is a wide-open wound. The followers I fooled and scattered when I had to turn back. My shamed ancestors. The Ghostline I birthed and abandoned. And Simra was gone by then — not there to see us shatter. I thought if the reason was right then whatever I did could never be wrong. But the path I led them down went nowhere but back on itself. And the sin of what I did was deeper than I let myself know…

“I did something worse than I thought,” I say, and my voice comes flat and hard as slate, resigned with the ring of prophecy. “And I saved less in doing so than I’d hoped.”

“And that’s why we’re here now? Duty means you have to undo what you did?”

“Yes.”

“Like duty back then meant you had to do it in the first place? Tsscht. Sounds like your duty needs to make its mind up. Get its priorities solid.”

I begin to cry. I choke back a sob and three more take its place, coughing up from my clenching lungs to foam on the twist of my lips. There are tears, hot on my stinging cheeks — a language saying something too torn and fluid and everyway-pulled to ever be put to words.

“Oh fuck. Oh fuck, no, I’m sorry, I didn’t mean—… What’s wrong? Hey. Look at me, I’m sorry, what’s wrong?”

Me, all along, for all I know. The purpose all my life and learning has been wrapped around til now. “I don’t know!”

“Please, Tammu…” Panic enters Simra’s voice. “Not here. Not now!”

“I’ve lost it…”

“Lost? No. No no no, not down here.”

“…don’t know anymore.”

“No. Listen. Listen to me. Religion or not, what you did was good. The bravest best maddest most selfless fucking thing I’ve ever known anyone to do, and if you had to feel like you sold part of yourself to do it? Give up a bit of what makes you feel right? All the fucking more so, Tam! That’s why they followed you. That’s why I came back looking for you.” His voice cracks. His dialect slips. “Because you’re good! You’re kind. And you tell yourself it’s all just inevitable obligatory crowshit – the dead needing their dues – but it’s the living you’re helping! Every fucking time! They’re the ones deserve you, ‘cos the dead don’t give a fuck..!”

I feel fingers against my cheeks and fingers in my hair and I know they can’t be his. I hear a lullaby, swimming my mind away from itself. A sinking feeling, like sleep.

 

 

_“We Velothi,” she begins. “What do we do for our dead?”_

_I know the answer. Rehearsed, I recite it: “We give them to the flames, the wind, the waters.”_

_“Why?”_

_To this I have no answer ready. I struggle. “So they don’t go to the Void? We make them a part of something big. Something deathless, so they can never die?”_

_“Yes and no, Tam… You know it’s not just fire, wind, and water. The Urshilaku and inland Ahemmusa have their bone-caves and put their dead deep, in mountains, cliffs, and gullies. Vereansu like me? We give our dead to the sky. And d’you know why that is? I’ll tell you, little one. We make them part of things that’re constant in our lives so that they’re with us, constantly. Ready to aid and advise, and ready to catch us if we fall, because the Void is hunger and wants nothing but to eat, and eat, and eat…”_

_I frown. “I don’t understand.” I let myself say it, knowing that she is not Nanrahamma or Tanet, who would grow frustrated, pinch my flesh, lose hope in my future. But Noor lets me ask questions. She has always asked many of her own._

 

 

Inevitability, running the joints and joists of my limbs and straightening the paths of my mind. The feeling of formless knowing grows. From formlessness it tries on shapes. Some are familiar, others strange. It wants to push forward. I want to linger on. It’s good to lie down.

I am curled on my side, no longer being held. My back is to a wall, safe-feeling and solid, and my eyes are turned on Simra. He crouches like he does, sitting on his bunched thighs and calves so as not to touch the ground. He leans against the tunnel’s back wall.

The world has gone red once more. My magelight must have gone out as I fell away from myself. His face is stiff and drawn with maintaining the glow. Wordless, I relieve it, giving out my own green-blue whisper. He nods thanks and lets his light go out. The nod remains, becoming a shallow bow. His head hangs down.

The angle of his face pulls away from me, bruised-herb bashful for what he said before. He’s buried his words and his passion already, ashamed at the outburst. I’ve held onto them, warm in my mind. I let myself look on his face.

“I watched your lips for weeks,” I say. “After Bodram. My bad luck, you told me. I learnt to read them, until I could tell how much time you’d already spent apologising for them. Stiff and twisted; like trying to listen to talk from a maimed tongue. But I listened and learned…”

I see his jaw clench and lax. I see his teeth work against his bottom lip. I put down an elbow, then a hand, and come to sit upright with legs tucked beneath me.

“I think I’d known you since Blacklight…”

“A few days after,” he remembers. “The night after we left New Soluthis, everyone either hungover or still drunk. Everyone able to be…”

“And you ask me, how long have I known what your marks mean? The insult written on your face. And I tell you now: it was almost as long as I’d known you. I read your face, and thought, ‘No, better I believe they mean nothing than that.’ The truth of your lying, written on you in script you were never taught to read… But even your name was a lie at first. The whole first stretch of my knowing you, I knew a lie. And I thought, ‘Perhaps it was a warning after all.’”

Simra takes a drink from his waterskin. Still his eyes are elsewhere, and his face turns hard with conflict.

“Let me go on,” I say. “A month or two I’d known you, but never looked you in the face longer than a moment, and I thought that was enough to read it. And then suddenly we were never apart. After Bodram, when we travelled on. We were so close it exhausted us both. Still we stayed together. Deaf and tongueless, I had to stare at your face to hear you speak in my mind. My mouth and my hands and the way my body spoke — you had to do the same. At first it felt like burning, seeing so much and being so seen. But then I grew to like the warmth.”

He’s turned to me. His lips part to talk.

“Please. Please, let me finish.” I break my eyes away from him and speak what’s left to the ceiling. “I want you to understand. The broken half of the marks at my mouth that say I’m One Who Speaks. The not-completed copy you wear — I thought that meant, One Who Half-Speaks. One Who Speaks Half-Truths. The broken half of the marks I remember my sister wore, at your eye, I thought meant you were One Who Half-Sees. One Whose Eyes Are Ignorant. Do you see..? I’m sorry… But do you see?”

“I don’t see why you’re telling me this.” His voice lays open as a wound.

“Because I was wrong. I think I was wrong. I remember you used to tell me the things I couldn’t sense. What the other travellers spoke about — stories they told. The voices of the stones as the river ran over them. The sound of the sea as we drew close. And it came to me: a new sense of what the marks your mother gave might mean. Both marks were halved to show they were two parts of the same whole. A sentence. I wondered if maybe they might mark you as One Who Speaks As They See. One who records and reports. Do you see? Not a clan- or harrowmark known to me, or perhaps to anyone else, but…it suits you.”

Simra frowns. A hand goes to his neck, touching and gripping. I see the knuckles flex white in thought. “A hoarder and teller of tales..? Someone who collects and gives out stories?” A crack opens in his voice, then closes, hiding itself. “…That’s better. Much better. Thank you.”

We sit in silence after that, until the time comes again to stand.

 

 

_Deflated domes and broken spires. We shelter in the long lean-to of a half-collapsed porchway. A mosaic of scattered rooftiles splays across the courtyard. Cracked pillars of scented wood. Shadows still scorched onto the outside walls._

_We had thought Bodram was a ruin. I had thought it was full of ghosts. What’s left of Old Ebonheart is worse. And this is only the outskirts. We are still on the mainland._

_Simra and I sit. Our backs are to a fallen statue that wind and grit have smoothed faceless into a menhir._

_There is meat. The Vereansu have good hunters among them. They killed a kagouti and brought me a choice share of its tender cheeks, roasted over stones that Simra’s helped them to heat. And the course along the River Balda was good earth once, patched with croplands — millet on the high grounds, wickwheat in the low. The once-tame crops broke free long ago with no-one to tend them. We gathered wild grain as we came. So there is grain too, cooked in bone-broth._

_But by night the chills come down. We huddle for warmth around fire-warmed flame-bleached stones._

_Even Simra curls into my side as I curl over him, smaller, cooler, wrapped about the heated core of him. He stifles himself and goes sleepless, all his thoughts taken up with willing himself to just be still — silent breathing, stammering heart._

_I am almost asleep when he uncurls. The dark is total but I hear him speak._

_“You’re shivering.”_

_After touch, hearing is the next to return, among the things that Bodram tore from me. I can’t feel my toes or my fingers. A weird white heat fills my bones. Beyond that, there’s only his eyes on me, useless in the dark. They are a kind of warmth, alongside the share of nameless flesh he’s left, faint-pressed against me._

_My voice is still gone. My lips shape the words, ‘I’m sorry’, before I remember he won’t see them._

_It starts like a long-drawn note, serrating through me. Something I’ve not felt in so long, but failed to forget for all the times I’ve relived it. A bookshop in the Grey Quarter; Senvalis, and the lock of dark hair that always escaped his topknot. Atadi’s gleaming arms and the smooth crease of her cheeks when she smiled. The last I saw of Talhril; his sleeping face._

_My lips part now as they long to be parted against. I have no voice to ask him._

_Something comes flat across my hip, then flexes down to fit its form. A hand, long-fingered, unsteady. I hear his breath almost make words, but in the end there comes nothing but air, on my cheeks and eyelashes as his face nears mine._

_Like picking up a pot still hot from the fire, the touch lasts only as long as he can bear it. He snatches away his hand, and turns away. With his back to me, he tries to sleep._

_My lips make the words again: ‘I’m sorry. I’m sorry.’ I would have said yes._

_In the morning, Winter reigns. Frost lies stiff on our clothes, and the wind off the sea is fanged with unseen ice._

 

 

His sword is drawn and levelled at the darkness. My magelight gives the metal a dull and inward gleam, like clouds have when hiding a pair of shining moons.

“Fucking saw something…” he hisses.

I feel her around me so strong now that it’s like a storm, a downpour. A beckoning welcoming openness. I can’t sense shifts or subtleties for all the force of her noise and my eyes are too bad to rely on. Instead I help Simra to see.

The magelight throbs, welling up with a soft pulse of sound and light. Its glimmering heart stays hovering still, but the pool of light it throws moves flowing forward, along the tunnel ahead. A wave of liquid light that breaks and dies after probing the darkness.

“There! See that? Something moved.”

“What kind of something?”

“Low. Hunched down.” Simra grimaces. “Size of a man maybe, but not moving like one. Shambler, maybe? A hand of hers, like you said last time?”

“Maybe…” Was it sent to watch or catch? Hand or eye? I handle the thought with care, working to build and complete it…

“Tsscht. Only surprised it’s taken this long. Just need to be ready for when the fuckers get braver… D’you have weapons? Armour? If you do, now’d be the time.”

My hand goes to my side, where Josket hangs at my belt. Flint and horn, bone and hair. “I’ll be fine,” I say.

I think: There’ll be no call for them. Perhaps, perhaps… I’ve known for longer than I’ve known this. Perhaps, perhaps… The pieces come together. Still, I don’t ask Simra to sheathe his sword. I don’t think she’ll hurt us now. She’s had her chances and hasn’t, with us crawling deep along the strands of her web. I try not to think that we must hurt her, all the same…

“Not far now,” I say to Simra.

“You’ve been saying that for days.”

“It’s grown truer every time.”

“So how true is it now, really?” He talks more than he needs to, when his nerves pull tight.

“Not far.”

The chamber where we find her is no different from the rest of the tunnels and rooms we’ve passed through. Only size sets it apart. Even then, it’s no bigger than the cornerclub room we rented and slept in, but webs off in half a dozen split directions, tunnel by tunnel off from its heart. A slow gentle dome forms its ceiling — yurtlike, I think. Yes, I see why she would choose this chamber.

Her body is here but she’s elsewhere. Everywhere, perhaps, except inside the hunched down bundle that sits, legs crossed, in the room’s dark middle. The room’s air reeks of hunger and neglect.

Simra prowls the chamber’s slim perimeter. His legs are bunched, half-crouching. His sword is held ready in uneasy fingers. He expected urgency — a fight and then victory. This still and tomblike hush gnaws at him.

He looks at me, pointed and questioning. His eyes have gone wide and quick again, like he’s deep-gone into the grips of guljana again. And, expecting a fight, perhaps he has. Or perhaps it’s only uncertainty.

I shake my head and make of my face a soft calm mask. I go to my knees and sit before her as he stares at me, incredulous.

Coat and tassel-hemmed shawl, threadbare guar blanket. String on string of beads hang rank as waterlogged moor-ropes around her bird-scrawny neck and shoulders. Under them, she has wasted with stillness and starved down til nearly nothing remains. Her face is tilted down and covered by long-draping hair. Once it had all the brown shine of wood made precious and polished by age, but now is knotted and haggard with grey. Hidden face and change-bleached hair, I still know her, like I knew I would know her, like I know now that I have all along…

“Blessings on you, Noor.”

I feel a shift of the air around us. A presence congeals from the chamber’s stale space. I close my eyes and bow my head, mirroring her.

“Tammu?” Simra’s voice comes close to panic.

It rides over the growing plague of sound that comes from the chamber’s edges and side-tunnels. Slithering, dragging, dry and breathless motion.

“You know her?! Tammu..!”

I hear a kindling sound. The roaring whisper of newborn flames.

“Don’t!” I hiss. “Do not move. Do not speak. Do not listen, do not see.”

His obedience is a muteness amidst what follows. A pestle-and-mortar grinding and wing-flap leathern sigh as things that need not breathe try to shape air into speech.

“And blessings on you, sweet brother…” It is whisper, shout, and grumbling roar. Simra’s breath stutters beneath it. “What news of the world you’ve been walking?”

When the dead speak in the world of the living, it’s never so sweet as in the minds of the wise. I know this, and do not cringe as Simra does.

“The air is cool and the wind cold, but the sun is warm and kind. It’s almost Winter, Noor. The mountain streams here are skinny with coming ice.”

“I had thought—…” the dead voices begin to say. “I’d thought it was Summer still. Tam… Sweet brother, I was so warm. You’ve brought the Winter with you, little one. So bright and white and cold…”

“I’ve brought the world back to you, Noor. The feeling changing world.”

“The merciless cold. The driving rain. My deafened mind. Or did their tongues fall silent..?”

“You’re young. There’s blood yet in your heart. Breath yet in your chest. You’ve left yourself behind too soon. And not for your own ancestors, but for this… My mistake. Why?”

“I have no ancestors!” The voices lash out in a chorus of snapping sinews, plucked nerves, shattered bone. “I couldn’t hear them. Not in the wind or the flames. Not in my dreams. Nothing. I’d forgotten the quiet I knew as a child… They abandoned me. And in their silence I heard the Void.”

“You were afraid…”

“I knew what waited without them! No Ghostline to tie me to this world..!”

“This is no Ghostline, Noor. There’s no honour or ancestry in this. No reverence working both ways.” Her words clench and claw at my heart. It’s hard to speak soft and calm, but I must. Like to a child…

“It’s all I have!”

“Then all you have, you’ve stolen. Pieces of family, scraps of memory, braided in to strengthen what I left behind — the sin you taught me to commit…”

“Yes. Yes. What you left behind. You were here – family – all I had now, here in the Ghostline you made for me. A hope. I had hoped you would come. Join me. I had hoped…”

The voices fall into canon and disarray. They speak out of time, muddling their words. The confusion tears at her, piece by fragmented piece.

“You hoped and I came,” I say. “I’m here with you, in life. Join me.”

I put my palms together and open them out. My magelight comes back reborn. My eyes open a moment before hers. Noor’s head lifts, stiff and weak and slack. She is One Who Sees, say the marks round her eyes. She is One Who Mourns, say the lines down her cheeks. She is One Who Heals, say the marks on her lower lip. Her hollow face looks into mine, and I look to Simra, who stands with his sword poised.

“Now,” I tell him.

“No.”

“What? Now, I said — kill her!”

“Ghosts and bones, I said no! I won’t!”

“Tam…” Noor’s voice creaks from her mask-fixed face. “Please..?”

Shadows creep beyond the light I cast. Dessicated muscle moves rasping over bones. Her confusion turns to fear. Her cornered panic shows in the shadows and shapes of the dead, even if not yet in her stiff face or small cold voice.

My hand goes quick inside my clothes and closes round the warm bone hilt of my knife.

“Tam, listen…”

My heart catches and wrenches, furious to be heard as I try not to hear it. Before, I thought I could surprise myself — do it before the feeling rushed in, fingers tight and teary-eyed-hot round my wrist. But my knife-hand comes up. A stinging crash of pain meets it on the way, jolting the blade from my fingers.

“Tammu!”

I yelp, a moment late. Simra has struck me with his blade. The hand is still whole. How? The flat, then. Even so, there are tears smarting at the corners of my eyes. My wrist swells, filling up with ache.

“Why not?” My voice comes broken and childish. “I must! I have to!”

“Why the fuck must you!? To punish your sister or fix your own fuck-up?”

“To free the dead she’s bound to her!” I sob. I don’t want to, but I will, but don’t want to, but when has what I want ever joined with what I have to do..?

“Please… You’ll set them loose,” Noor croaks. “The Void, without me... It’ll be the Void. For them and for me. That’s not freedom. I preserved them. Please…”

“Please…” I whimper.

“Listen,” Simra hisses. “Listen!” And his hand closes round the collar of my smock, yanking me away, onto my back and onto the ground. His face snarls close to mine. “A stranger, I could understand, but this? This’ll tear you to pieces! I won’t let it. I won’t let you.”

“Why?” The sound is almost soundless.

“Because I need you, or her, and if you kill her then I’ll have as good as neither, you sanctimonious duty-bound holy-hobbled little—”

“Tammu?” Noor’s voice cuts through the chaos, stilling my struggle and Simra’s restraints. “A story. I want to know if you remember. I want to know… Do you remember why the Vereansu give so much to the sky?” Slow and staggering, she finds her strength. “Burnt offerings and the smoke of our fires; the steam of our breath in Winter and the souls of our dead when they die… Do you remember why I told you? It’s to get what the sky will give us in return. So that it will show us the sun. So it will grant us rain. A story, only a story, but it teaches something I tried so hard to teach you…”

“‘Why make Ghostlines at all?’ you asked me. ‘What are they for? Why do we give them the gifts we do?’”

“And I told you what Nanra and Tan never would. That we give to them so they’ll give back. That Ghostlines are for the living. They give a wisewoman her wisdom, to help the clan. They give a warrior strength. But to all Dunmer, Velothi or not, they give the gift we made them for: they wait to welcome us, with us always, so Dunmer may live without fearing death. We catch the dead, and keep them from the Void, so in time they will do the same for us. Even so, they lose themselves with age. Who’s to say they’re really their selves any longer—”

“Punarigash heresy. Is that why you outcast yourself?” I ask, soft. “From Nanrahamma and Tanet and me?”

“They outcast me! I asked questions. Believed it was better to find ways to help the living than blindly serve the dead. I tried to teach you those ways – old ways and new – and they sent me walking. Cut me from my Ghostline. Can you imagine the terror..?”

Simra nods. “I was born with it. I lived with it. I don’t want to die with it too, knowing there’s nothing but nothing after. I’d’ve fixed it too, like you, if I knew how. From you or from her or by any means — that’s…that’s all I wanted.”

I look at him now, knowing the answer he refused to give me. This is why he needed me. This is why he returned.

Noor sees him too, in a new and blazing light. “Can you still not understand?” she turns to me and asks. “Do you still blame me for questioning the old ways when they would have had you kill your mother’s own daughter?” Hope shines in her eyes. She looks just as I remember her. Almost, almost… “And for what? I saved the fading dead and gave them safety. Peace!”

My tongue knots, dry and wooden; a choke-solid line of indecision down my throat.

“I only want what she wanted,” Simra says. “What you and all the others have. For you to find my Line and bind me into it. To not be afraid anymore…”

“I wiped away the blood that made this place reek and kept it a ruin, and I gave its people back their homes! That choice was mine and you think your ancestors would see me damned for it? What else have they made you do, Tam? Would your ancestors ever have asked this of you in life? Did death make them cruel, or make them something new, no longer themselves?”

“I came to you because I knew you. You don’t just serve the dead. You help the living. Always and every fucking time, Tammu. The secret beating heart, kind at the core of all your fucking duty…”

His sword is sheathed again. He has leant his weight from off me once more. They fall silent. In their quiet I could reach for my waist and call Josket: the sivami spirit I made to protect me from the living — to hurt and kill them, so I would never be hurt again. But Josket has tasted too much blood. And I have missed Noor too much, missed Simra too much, years and all these years. I have walked so long, serving the dead, I forgot that love is for the living. The dead asked no favours but that I forget myself. Starve, go sleepless, suffering in service.

I wonder if Noor has always been right… I will give her a chance to be. I will give myself a chance not to be alone.

“Will you come with us?” I ask her. “To the Grazelands. Is that right?” I turn to Simra. “The Grazelands? You are Zainab, aren’t you?”

“I hope to be,” he says. “If we go. If you’ll help me.”

“Will you come?” I ask again, hoping, needing Noor. I’ll be weak with my choices being only my own. I am small when I’m only myself. “Or is this your place now? With your clan..?”

Her neck dips, halfway between a nod and a bow. “Without me, they are only bones.” The creeping shapes we tried not to see sink from the edges of our vision, the limits of my light, and slip into silence. “But the Line will linger, waiting, and a whisper of it will come with me. Besides, you were part of it, from the root. You and they are all the clan I have now. I’ll come…” She stands, a slow unbending of whining limbs. “What was it you said? About the sun?”

“Warm,” I say. “And kind.”


End file.
